June is National Pride Month! During the month people throughout the nation celebrate anything and everything to do with the LGBTQ+ community and what it means to be queer. From pride parades and drag shows, to people sharing how they identify, June is a month of acceptance and coming together as a community to support one another.
LBCC is joining in on the pride by hosting their own celebrations June 3, from noon to 4 p.m. at the Albany campus courtyard. Attendees can expect an afternoon of music, dancing and a whole lot of pride! And it will include drag performances, pizza and drinks.
Last year’s pride festivities brought out many people. Stickers, pins, flags and bracelets representing different sexualities and identities were available for anyone to take and display their own identity proudly. The celebration included drag performances from Corvallis’ Haus of Dharma.
The history of pride celebrations goes back to 1969, when the Stonewall Inn in New York City, one of the few establishments at the time to welcome openly gay individuals, was raided by police. The patrons of Stonewall refused to accept the mistreatment by police, inciting an uprising. At the end of the night 13 people were arrested, several people hospitalized, and four police officers injured. This uprising would be the spark that led to the widespread LGBTQ+ movement and the pride celebrations we know today.
One year after the Stonewall uprising the first pride march was held. Thousands of people attended this first march. Yearly pride marches continued as commemoration of the Stonewall uprising. June was officially declared “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month” in 1999 by President Bill Clinton, however it had already been unofficially considered the month of pride for many years.
Today people celebrate pride the whole month of June with parades, festivals and parties. The LGBTQ+ community has continued to grow and the open acceptance of queer people in the United States is higher than ever.
This article originally appeared in the May 2025 edition of The Commuter.
