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Daily Mirror
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Who founded Pride Month and when did the first celebration take place
While former U.S. President Bill Clinton was the first to declare a Gay and Lesbian Pride Month in June 1999, the history of Pride dates back decades earlier to the Stonewall riots. Sunday, June 1 marks the beginning of Pride Month in the UK, with marches and events occurring throughout the country all month long. Pride Month is a time to both commemorate the history of the Stonewall riots as well as to celebrate the activism and contributions of the LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) community. To better understand the significance of the month, here is a brief breakdown of the history of Pride Month, including its notable patrons and dates. Who started Pride Month? New Yorker Brenda Howard is considered the 'Mother of Pride' for coordinating a rally followed by the Christopher Street Liberation Day March to mark the first anniversary of Stonewall Riot. She came up with the idea for a week-long series of events around Pride Day which eventually grew into the large-scale annual Pride celebrations held globally today. Who is Brenda Howard? Brenda Howard was a long-time champion of bi-inclusion and was a fixture in New York City's LGBTQ+ community. Howard was also active in the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which supported New York City's LGBT rights law in 1986. In 1987, she helped found the New York Area Bisexual Network to coordinate services to the bisexual community. She was also an active member of the early bisexual political activist group BiPAC, a Regional Organizer for BiNet USA, a co-facilitator of the Bisexual S/M Discussion Group, and a founder of the nation's first Alcoholics Anonymous chapter for Bisexuals. Who is Marsha P. Johnson? Gay rights activist Marsha P. Johnson is an icon of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) who is often cited as the architect of the Stonewall riots. Johnson is also known as the "Saint of Christopher Street" - the street where Stonewall Inn was based - for her devotion to the LGBTQ+ youth. From the foundations of the GLF, Marsha joined friend and fellow activist Sylvia Rivera in founding Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, which offered shelter and care for young transgender people. Throughout the 1970s and prior to her tragic death, Johnson became more widely known for advocating for the liberation of gay people from prisons and equal rights in the United States. When was the first Pride Month in the UK? The UK's first Pride march was held in London on July 1, 1972. This date was specifically chosen as it was the nearest Saturday to the anniversary of the Stonewall riots in the U.S. which saw LGBT+ patrons targeted by the New York Police Department. After the first Pride march in London, marches were held across the UK - though not consistently - during the 1970s and 1980s. For years, London hosted the UK's main Pride event, with people travelling from around the UK to attend. Today, regional celebrations and marches occur across the country every June. Help us improve our content by completing the survey below. We'd love to hear from you! When is Pride Month? Pride Month in the United Kingdom runs throughout the month of June each year. This year it will run from Sunday, June 1 to Monday, June 30.
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Why Are Trans People Such an Easy Political Target? The Answer Involves a Surprising Culprit.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. When news broke in February that the National Park Service, following an anti-trans executive order from President Donald Trump, had removed any mention of transgender people from the webpages of the Stonewall National Monument, many in the LGBTQ+ community were understandably outraged. But I was not surprised. For one thing, the move only continued, in a small and yet symbolically potent way, the new administration's aggressive and ongoing push to strip transgender people of civil rights and erase them from public life. But as a scholar of queer political history, I also saw a grim inevitability in the trans 'deletion.' This historical vandalism, and the larger assault of which it is a part, has been, I'm sorry to say, only a matter of time. While it may be tempting to put all the blame on Trump or the Republicans or Project 2025 (and they deserve the lion's share), to do so would be to ignore decades of choices, missed opportunities, and betrayals within the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement that, read together, show how and why transgender people find themselves so vulnerable to political scapegoating and attacks today. The story starts at Stonewall itself—or at least with how we choose to remember it. Were the riots in late June of 1969 started by two transgender women of color, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson; a Black butch lesbian named Stormé DeLarverie; or, in the more recent popular rendition of the story by director Roland Emmerich, a white gay man from the Midwest named Danny wearing boat shoes? Disagreements among scholars and activists over who, exactly, threw the first punch (or purse, or brick, or shot glass, depending on which version you believe) have less to do with historical accuracy and more to do with asserting who, exactly, belongs in this central narrative of queer history—an event that, for better or worse, is widely viewed as the birthplace of the modern 'gay rights' movement. The history just after Stonewall sheds light on how trans vulnerabilities evolved as well. In the days immediately following the riots, gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals organized the Gay Liberation Front to work alongside the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, Women's Liberation Movement, and student anti-war movements. The ethos was joint consciousness and radical political tactics. People who identified as drag queens, butches, or transsexuals (the term primarily used before transgender was introduced in the early 1990s) were all welcome thanks to the focus on solidarity. This cooperative mood shifted fairly quickly, though, when the Black Panther Party requested contributions from GLF and other radical groups to bail out the Panther 21 (21 Black Panther members who were accused of planning an attack on New York City police stations and were later acquitted). Some white gay members of GLF argued that their meager treasury should only be spent on issues that directly affected gay people 'as gays' and immediately broke off to form a new group, the Gay Activists Alliance. This split marked the beginning of an era of gay politics that catered primarily to the interests of white gay (and some lesbian) membership. The drag queens, butches, and trans people who previously felt welcome in GLF due to its radical approach to politics reported feeling silenced, demobilized, and excluded from GAA's strict rules for what constituted a 'gay issue.' Over time, GLF folded and other groups with similar approaches to politics as the GAA, including the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, continued to work on 'gay issues,' while largely ignoring transgender and, to a lesser extent, bisexual people. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, movement leaders made the strategic decision to put daylight between gay men and lesbians on one hand, and transgender (and bisexual) people on the other, due to fears that trans people would weaken the argument that cisgender gay men and lesbians were legally entitled to the same rights as their straight counterparts. It was one thing to argue that denying rights to gay people is wrong because they differed from other citizens only with respect to the gender they happened to love. It was something far more radical, these leaders felt, to ask the public to rethink the gender binary and stability of sex and sexual attraction entirely, which the very existence of bisexual, and especially transgender, people tends to do. And so the mainstream organizations chose the path of least resistance. A few examples from my archival research show how time and time again transgender people have been made vulnerable by decisions to not center, or even include them, in political organizing. Take, for instance, what happened when separate gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender interest groups proliferated in the 1990s. In September 1998, the National Policy Roundtable—a meeting of executive directors from all the major lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender interest groups—was convened in D.C. to discuss strategies to confront the rise of conversion therapy, the quack practice that promised to make gay men and lesbians into upstanding heterosexual members of society. The key problem on the agenda at that meeting was whether sexuality is immutable, which had become an issue due to Christian conversion therapy programs that claimed that gay men and lesbians were not expressing 'innate' sexuality but rather simply in need of therapeutic modifications to change their desires. At the meeting, Chai Feldblum of the Georgetown University Law Center proposed sidestepping that question in favor of emphasizing a less heady and more palatable platform: that gay men and lesbians simply wanted to get married and start families. 'To me, what we need to do is say that taking this action is good for the individual, good for the family, and good for society,' she said in response to questions about immutability and conversion therapy. Feldblum went on to explain her position. 'It's morally good. … And having loving families is good for society.' Another participant agreed, explaining that 'nature/nurture is less the question than presenting the meaning of homosexuality.' The 'meaning' of gay and lesbian identification alluded to here was akin to the promise of coming out: allowing self-love, acceptance, and pride to model a utopian world where all are valued. For these leaders, ignoring questions about the immutability of sexuality was a move in the direction of recognizing gay- and lesbian-headed families. Doing so would not dramatically alter the social fabric and challenge traditional mores but rather extend and bolster them by merely folding in gay men and lesbians, based on the argument that variations in human sexuality are natural and inherent. However, other participants drew attention to the possibility that this strategy might exclude transgender and bisexual members of the community. Transgender activists were concerned that the focus on sexuality would leave gender out of the picture and render the demographically small group even more powerless; meanwhile, bisexuals were worried that the focus on immutability would diminish their passionate view that desire is flexible and not defined by gender. Jessica Xavier—founder of the transgender lobbying group It's Time, America!—proposed addressing these tensions in relation to conversion therapy by focusing on how the tie that truly binds LGBTQ+ people together is not sexuality but gender variance. 'We talk about gender variance when men take jobs as nurses [and] when men have long hair,' she said, to explain why the pivot away from morality toward gender variance was necessary. If you extend this view, you quickly realize that engaging in same-sex sexual relationships is in itself a defiance of gender norms, much like career and grooming choices. Xavier elaborated her perspective: 'If we frame this as a larger societal pressure that reaches to straight people … If we all realize that we're fighting the same enemy in different ways, that language has more implications for society: It's gender.' Gender and sexuality are impossible to tease apart, and those connections affect everybody who has ever worried that maybe they aren't 'man enough' or 'a good woman.' Attacks on transgender people are toothless in a social world where everybody is freed from strict gender norms. But such freedom also makes it harder to control populations, which might explain why political power grabs usually feature some aspect of suppressing gender expression. Sidelining transgender people from the mainstream gay and lesbian movement came to a head in 2007, when Democrats took advantage of their new congressional majority to introduce the Employment Non-discrimination Act, which proposed federal protections for workers on the basis of sexual orientation. Transgender people were conspicuously absent from the final legislation, which, unsurprisingly, did not sit well with that community. Openly gay Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank sponsored the bill and offered a lengthy defense of his decision to remove protections for transgender people from ENDA. After explaining that the moment was right for ENDA because gay men and lesbians had worked for decades to educate lawmakers and voters that sexual orientation discrimination is unjust, Frank set responsibility for the exclusion of gender identity protections squarely on the shoulders of transgender people. 'One of the problems I have found over the years of discussing this is an unwillingness on the part of many, including leaders in the transgender community, to acknowledge a fact: namely that there is more resistance to protection for people who are transgender than for people who are gay, lesbian, and bisexual,' Frank flatly stated at the time. His view was echoed by others across the political spectrum including the Washington Post editorial board, which opined that transgender people ought to educate people on transgender discrimination if they wanted to be included in workplace protections. In any case, the 2007 ENDA failed to pass (it remains on the legislative sidelines to this day). A wave of laws defining marriages as exclusive to one man and one woman between the late 1990s and 2015 drew the movement's attention away from ENDA and toward marriage equality, which was eventually won at the Supreme Court. Ironically, in 2020, that same body ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that employment discrimination against a gay man is, in fact, gender discrimination because, as Xavier argued almost 20 years earlier, sexuality and gender are impossible to tease apart. These examples represent just a handful of many moments when gay and lesbian activists participated in the erasure (and stigmatization) of transgender people because, as they saw it, the transgender group was too small; gender variance would be too hard to explain to middle America; and, as one line of reasoning went, maybe transgender people needed their own organizations to do that work. Over time, focusing on sexuality, relationships, and families headed by same-sex partners meant that gender essentially fell off the 'LGBT' agenda—until suddenly it became the right's primary target. As a result, transgender people are now vulnerable to political attacks for many reasons, not least of which is the missed opportunity over those many decades to educate the public about gender norms and gender variance. It's safe to say that this history might also be why those in power can behave as though the group doesn't have the backing of a critical mass of supporters or influential allies—because of this legacy of negligence by the larger movement, frankly, they don't. Clearly, the resistance to addressing gender head-on earlier in our history has had a broader impact on how LGBTQ+ politics are understood today. In particular, the failure to center gender and the ideas about masculinity and femininity that affect us all (not just LGBTQ+ people) has meant that coalitions with other groups were over before they began. These include most obviously organizations fighting for reproductive rights and gender equity, as well as others focused on bodily autonomy, such as activists looking to preserve the right to asylum, provide food and shelter to poor and homeless people, and end mass incarceration. In February, Lamba Legal and seven other LGBTQ+ organizations announced that they were suing the Trump administration for erasing transgender people from laws and defunding critical support for people living with HIV. This is certainly a step in the right direction. If history is any indication, it will be even stronger when gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people join with advocates of bodily autonomy across the board to recognize that—in general, but especially under this viciously hostile administration—our fates are all bound together.
Associated Press
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Heritance Hotels and Resorts Partners with Galle Literary Festival as Exclusive Opening Night Sponsor
/ -- Heritance Hotels and Resorts, the flagship brand of Aitken Spence Hotels, proudly announces its continued collaboration with the Galle Literary Festival (GLF) 2025. This year, Heritance Hotels and Resorts will serve as the exclusive sponsor of the festival's opening night on 5 February. Rooted in a legacy of cultural preservation and authentic experiences, Heritance Hotels and Resorts shares a natural synergy with the ethos of GLF, which celebrates creativity, intellectual discovery, and Sri Lanka's rich artistic heritage. This collaboration highlights Heritance's unwavering commitment to fostering creativity and promoting cultural sustainability while delivering unparalleled hospitality. The festival's Opening Night will set the tone for the festival, offering guests an immersive experience that bridges tradition and innovation - hallmarks of the Heritance brand. The event will bring together an inspiring guest list, including renowned authors, literary figures, and thought leaders, offering guests an evening enriched with artistry, conversation, and a vibrant celebration of Sri Lankan culture with some of the most influential voices in the world of literature. The evening will also feature a thoughtfully curated culinary experience by Heritance Ahungalla, showcasing fusion cuisine inspired by traditional Sri Lankan roots, blending flavors and heritage in every bite. 'For Heritance Hotels and Resorts, this collaboration is more than just sponsorship; it's a continuation of a shared journey toward cultural sustainability,' remarked Stasshani Jayawardena, Joint Deputy Chairperson and Joint Managing Director of Aitken Spence Hotel Holdings. 'The Galle Literary Festival provides a platform for diverse voices, intellectual exploration, and the celebration of both contemporary and classical art forms, values that are integral to the Heritance Hotels and Resorts brand. Together with GLF, Heritance Hotels and Resorts continues to showcase its belief in the transformative power of literature to connect communities, preserve heritage, and inspire future generations.' Heritance Hotels and Resorts welcomes festival attendees to an evening of inspiration and dialogue - where stories come alive, creativity flourishes, and connections are forged in the heart of Galle. This partnership further solidifies Heritance's role as a proud champion of Sri Lanka's artistic and cultural legacy. About Aitken Spence Hotels Aitken Spence Hotels oversees a diverse collection of 18 hotels and resorts across Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Oman, and India, through its varied collection of brands - Heritance Hotels and Resorts, Adaaran Resorts, and Turyaa. Heritance Hotels & Resorts, the flagship brand of Aitken Spence Hotels, is known for its portfolio of Bawa-designed hotels in Sri Lanka, adding a touch of architectural distinction to its rich offerings. Shivanka Nawarathne Aitken Spence Hotel Managements (Pvt) Ltd.
