ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
June is Pride Month, a time to recognize LGBTQ people's history and impact. Of course, the word pride wasn't always shorthand for LGBTQ empowerment. NPR's Juliana Kim has this history lesson.
JULIANA KIM, BYLINE: Pride was considered one of Christianity's seven deadly sins when it first appeared nearly a millennium ago. But within a few hundred years, the word took on a more positive spin, meaning a reasonable form of self-respect. Fast-forward to the 1960s, the concept of gay pride started to emerge.
MARC STEIN: There was even a group in Los Angeles that was founded in 1966 - so three years before Stonewall - that used pride as its acronym. It stood for Personal Rights in Defense and Education.
KIM: That's Marc Stein, a history professor at San Francisco State University, who's written six books on LGBTQ history. He says gay activists were inspired by the terms Black pride and Black power used during the Civil Rights Movement. Gay pride didn't really take off until after the Stonewall riots in 1969, when police raided a bar in New York City known to welcome gay patrons, sparking days of protests and becoming pivotal in the fight for LGBTQ rights. A few months later...
STEIN: It was then, November '69, at this meeting of East Coast gay activists that the decision was made - we should have a march in New York and in other places on the anniversary of Stonewall.
KIM: There was debate about what the slogan should be. Some wanted gay power, but organizer L. Craig Schoonmaker pushed for pride. He told The Illusionist in 2015, a few years before his death, that not everyone can have power, but anyone can have pride in themselves. It took a few more years, but soon the LGBT community rallied around the word and its meaning.
STEIN: It had special resonance for LGBTQ people because the notion before the '70s that gay people were sinful, were diseased, were criminal was so powerful that many people internalized that.
KIM: The LGBTQ community has made significant strides since its original marches, but in recent years, they've experienced pushback from political and religious conservatives.
STEIN: I think the strength of the backlash or the backsliding is a measure of how successful the movement had been for 50 years.
KIM: Stein adds that progress is rarely linear. Juliana Kim, NPR News.
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