SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
The date - June 28, 1970. Thousands of people marched in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago on the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. Here's what it sounded like on what was called Christopher Street Liberation Day.
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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting) Gay, gay, all the way. Gay, gay, all the way.
DETROW: This was the first pride march more than 50 years ago. Pride Month as we know it today was first recognized federally in 1999, when then-President Bill Clinton declared June as Gay and Lesbian Pride Month. And a lot has changed since then - the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, marriage equality, increased visibility, and even the name, which expanded to LGBTQ Pride.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Happy Pride Day. Using the confetti - I love it.
DETROW: But that momentum seems to have slowed down in recent years. Here's New York Congressman Ritchie Torres, the co-chair of the Equality PAC.
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RITCHIE TORRES: We are witnessing unprecedented fearmongering and scapegoating against LGBTQ people, against members of the trans community in particular.
DETROW: As of May, half of U.S. states have bans on trans healthcare for minors. And that's just one example. The ACLU says it is tracking 527 bills that it frames as anti-LGBTQ across the U.S. - legislation that would limit trans healthcare access, ban drag shows or censor curriculums at schools, among other things.
SARAH KATE ELLIS: There are a handful of bad actors that have created these bills, and they are really targeted toward the trans community and gender-nonconforming community. And when we think about that, you know, 30% of Americans say they know someone who's transgender, which means 70% of Americans don't or don't think they do. And so they are learning about these people primarily through cable news right now and these anti-trans bills. It's fear-mongering.
DETROW: That's Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and CEO of GLAAD, an LGBTQ nonprofit that advocates for better representation. She says that the anti-LGBTQ activists leading the charge are a small but vocal group of the American public, like the people who kicked off last year's backlash against corporate Pride campaigns that ended up making headlines. Bud Light drinkers took to social media to mobilize a boycott against Anheuser-Busch after it partnered with a popular trans content creator. Among other moments, musician Kid Rock posted a video of him shooting at cases of the beer.
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KID ROCK: [Expletive] Bud Light, and [expletive] Anheuser-Busch.
DETROW: And after the outdoor brand North Face partnered with a drag queen to promote their Summer of Pride events last June...
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PATTIE GONIA: Hi. It's me, Pattie Gonia, a real-life homosexual. And today I'm here with The North Face.
DETROW: The company saw a similar boycott. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene took to social media, calling on her followers to, quote, "not waste money on labels that are," quote, "grooming our children." Target ended up pulling some merchandise from its 2023 Pride collection after a wave of complaints, harassment and even threats of violence against its employees. But Ellis argues the reality is more nuanced, that these were only a couple of examples among hundreds of other successful corporate Pride campaigns.
ELLIS: Corporates have not stepped away from the LGBTQ community, and nor are they going to. Honestly, in order to future-proof their business, they have to include our community. When you look at Gen Z reporting 30% identify or are LGBTQ, that's a future consumer and a future employee.
DETROW: Ellis' outlook is shaped by that future. She says that a few bad actors come with increased visibility.
ELLIS: I am wildly optimistic. I think 10 years ago, Americans didn't even know transgender people. Like, Laverne Cox was not on the cover of Time Magazine. All of these stories that we've been able to work with Hollywood to have told with and for and of trans people have been out there. And that's what has caused this backlash in a lot of ways. Visibility comes at a price.
DETROW: CONSIDER THIS - more than 50 years of gay pride marches, parades, festivals and now partnership deals with major brands. It's increased LGBTQ visibility and community. And as a result, it has also become the target of backlash. After the break, we talk to the founder and host of the podcast "Making Gay History" about how LGBTQ Pride has evolved into how it's known today.
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DETROW: From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.
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DETROW: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. It's the final day of LGBTQ Pride Month, but for some, this year's Pride was a complicated one. On the one hand, there's increased visibility for the community, but some say there is a backlash to this visibility. This spring South Carolina became the 25th state to ban gender-affirming care for minors, as one example, continuing a major recent trend in statehouses. And this year there's been a pullback from Pride merchandising from brands like Target and Bud Light after pushback from working with LGBTQ influencers. So how do we square these two realities? For that, we called Eric Marcus, who is the founder and host of the "Making Gay History" podcast. He says that LGBTQ history is filled with moments of progress and backlash. And he began by telling me about the very first Pride parade.
ERIC MARCUS: The first march in 1970, which took nearly a year of planning - it was a protest march. It was not a celebration. It was mostly a protest march marking the anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising of gay people fighting back against oppression. And the people who organized it had no idea how many people would actually show up for it. It was a very different time. People were afraid of being visible.
And I remember interviewing one man who had been there, and he said he was terrified that it would be five of them or 10 of them marching up Sixth Avenue from Greenwich Village. And he said he looked back at one point, and there were hundreds, and then there were thousands. People came in from the sidelines, and people cheered. They were afraid that they would be attacked, that people would throw rocks at them. And by the time they reached Central Park, there were thousands and thousands of what we would call today LGBTQ people.
It was the largest gathering of LGBTQ people probably in the history of the world. And that was 1970. And they were shocked. They didn't expect it to go as well as it did. They were so scared, actually, that they joked that it was called not a march but a run because they moved so quickly up Sixth Avenue. And over time, it's evolved into something bigger. And today, to bring it up to the present day, in New York, we have two marches. One is the classic Pride march, which has now - has got a lot of corporate sponsors, and...
DETROW: Yeah.
MARCUS: ...It's music and the kind of thing you see on the news. And a few years back, one of my friends helped organize what's now called the Queer Liberation March, which was meant to echo those original protest marches because there are things to protest, and they were not so happy with the corporate sponsorships.
DETROW: Yeah. And I've had so many conversations and heard so many different views on that. On one hand, it is a sign of progress that so many big companies feel like the thing they need to do is take part in the Pride parade. On another, it feels cynical. It feels pandering. It feels like it takes the authenticity off of it. How have you thought about this?
MARCUS: I think it's both. Some of the comments I've heard over the years about corporate sponsorship have made me laugh because I'm old enough to remember when the idea that a corporation would associate itself with homosexuals was absolutely ridiculous.
DETROW: Right.
MARCUS: We were considered a marginal group of people and certainly not well-respected. We were sick, sinful and criminal. So a corporation wasn't going to sponsor one of our marches.
DETROW: Target wasn't cozying up.
MARCUS: No, no. In the earliest days, it was Subaru and American Airlines that took the leap to be sponsors, to be supportive. But it didn't just come from the outside in the idea or the belief that there was a significant market out there of LGBTQ people to market to. A lot of the pressure came from inside, from employees. Most major corporations now have employee resource groups for LGBTQ people. So when Target decided to pull back their Pride displays, they also had to deal with employees on the inside who would not be happy with that.
So I think it goes both ways. I remember a few years ago - I live in a neighborhood in New York City where a lot of the floats were set up prior to the march. And I walked around the corner, and there was a float for patio furniture in rainbow colors. And I thought, I think this has gone a step too far. And, you know, what is the relationship between patio furniture and LGBTQ people?
DETROW: Let me ask that. The public perception of LGBTQ issues has changed so dramatically in so many different ways in recent decades.
MARCUS: Oh, my goodness.
DETROW: Just talking about...
MARCUS: Yes.
DETROW: ...Most of our lifetimes. Are there - whether it's forward progress or backsliding, what are the one or two moments that really stick out to you where it was just crystal clear in your mind something's different here?
MARCUS: Oh, God. That's a very good question. The world has changed so dramatically. And I can look back now. I'm 65. And I can see key moments. I really wasn't very familiar with the history before I started my work in the late 1980s. But I was very aware of the movement in 1977, when Anita Bryant, who was a popular singer, launched an anti-gay campaign. It was the first national anti-gay campaign called Save Our Children. And she worked at rolling back the newly passed gay rights bill in Dade County, Fla., and then took her campaign across the country.
She used to say, homosexuals can't reproduce, so they recruit. So now we're back to that language again, except it's slightly altered. Now the accusation is that gay people are groomers and pedophiles. You know, it's such old stuff. So a key moment for me was that turning point because it compelled me to come out and be visible because I heard these people saying terrible things about me as a teenager. The AIDS crisis as well - as painful as that was and as much of a backlash that inspired at the time, it made us visible in a way that I don't think we could have ever imagined. And what people got to see was a community coming together to take care of each other.
DETROW: What's the best way that you explain it? - because I'm thinking about milestone moments where I saw something, I felt something was different, right? Now, I was a reporter in California when the 2013 Supreme Court ruling legalized same-sex marriage in California a few years before the national ruling. And I remember that outpouring of emotion...
MARCUS: Yes.
DETROW: ...And pop-up marriages in San Francisco and Sacramento and covering that. Then 10 years later - you know, this year, I've been - I'm just curious every time a pro sports team posts a Pride post on social media about, you know, Pride night at the stadium, going to the comments and seeing not only the backlash but people just saying statements that you would think, just a few years ago, people would never say in public - just anti-gay slurs...
MARCUS: Yeah.
DETROW: ...And attacks of, how dare you do this, for a pretty...
MARCUS: Yeah, it's...
DETROW: ...Innocuous, like, somebody throwing a first pitch type outing.
MARCUS: Yeah. We live in a moment when people, I think, feel perfectly privileged to say whatever they feel even if it's awful. And it's not just about gay people.
DETROW: Yeah.
MARCUS: But I also lived through a time when I first was out promoting my first book, "The Male Couple's Guide To Living Together," in 1988, a rather innocuous book. I was on CNN "NewsNight Update," an overnight call-in show. And I had people call up and call me [expletive] on the air. And one person called up and said I have my rights. I have the right to be chained to their truck and dragged down the highway. Another caller said I had my rights to serve as target practice in his backyard.
DETROW: Wow.
MARCUS: So just, you know, we're not used to it because things had changed so much. But we see political leaders now who say those things. And so it gives people permission to say that. But what the people who lead these backlashes don't understand is that every time they go after us, it inspires more people to come out and be visible. But I'm hopeful. I'm actually hopeful. It's easy for me, as a white, cisgender gay man of a certain age living in New York City, to say that. I also hear from kids who live in places where it's really rough.
DETROW: Yeah.
MARCUS: But I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful.
DETROW: That's Eric Marcus, host and founder of the "Making Gay History" podcast. Thank you so much.
MARCUS: A delight - very glad to speak with you. Happy Pride.
DETROW: You, too.
This episode was produced by Erika Ryan and Avery Keatley, with reporting from Barbara Sprunt and audio engineering by Neil Tevault. It was edited by Tinbete Ermyas. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun. And now just a reminder - you can now enjoy CONSIDER THIS in newsletter form. Just like on the podcast, we'll help you break down a major story of the day, but you also get to know our producers and hosts, and we will share some moments of joy from the ALL THINGS CONSIDERED team. You can sign up at npr.org/considerthisnewsletter.
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DETROW: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.
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