Why Pride Exists
A history of what the celebration was always responding to
It’s June again, and somewhere right now a pastor is preaching about it.
Not celebrating it. Lamenting it. Naming it as evidence of cultural decay, moral confusion, spiritual rebellion. The rainbow flags outside the coffee shop, the parade downtown, the month-long visibility — all of it framed as an offense against the natural order, a symptom of a society that has lost its way.
And in the pews, LGBTQ+ teenagers are sitting very still, learning what their church thinks of people like them.
This is not a new story. It is, in fact, the oldest version of the story. Understanding why Pride Month exists requires going back to where it started — not with a celebration, but with a raid.
The Raid
Just after midnight on June 28, 1969, nine police officers entered the Stonewall Inn — a small, crowded gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York City — and did what they had done many times before. They raided it.
At the time, laws criminalizing homosexuality were widespread across the United States. “Masquerade” laws required people to wear a minimum number of clothing items matching the gender on their state ID; police used these laws to arrest transgender and gender-nonconforming people on sight. Raids on gay bars were routine. The Stonewall Inn’s patrons — many of them transgender women, people of color, and young people with nowhere else to go — had been subjected to this harassment repeatedly, in this bar and in bars across the city.
That night, something shifted. When police began arresting employees and forcing patrons outside, the crowd didn’t disperse. People who had spent years absorbing state-sanctioned harassment decided, without coordination or planning, that they were done absorbing it. They fought back.
The riots outside the Stonewall Inn waxed and waned for six days. Many historians characterize the uprising as a spontaneous protest against the perpetual police harassment and social discrimination suffered by sexual minorities — people who had been told by both the law and the church that their existence was criminal, sinful, or both. Historian Lillian Faderman called it “the shot heard round the world.”
On June 28, 1970 — one year after the raid — several thousand people marched through the streets of Manhattan in what was called the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. It is now recognized as the first gay pride march.
In 1999, President Bill Clinton formally declared June as Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, cementing a tradition that community members and activists had honored for three decades.
Fifty years after the original raid, NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill apologized: “What happened should not have happened. The actions taken by the NYPD were wrong, plain and simple. The actions and the laws were discriminatory and oppressive, and for that, I apologize.”
Pride Month began as a commemoration of people who fought back against a state that wanted to erase them. It has never stopped being that.
The Years Between
Stonewall was not the end of the story. It was the beginning of a long, ongoing fight between LGBTQ+ people and a society — including its churches — that was not ready to accept them.
The 1970s saw more than a dozen states repeal their anti-sodomy laws. The movement that Stonewall ignited was creating real, measurable legal change. Then the 1980s arrived, and with them, the AIDS crisis — and the church’s response to it.
While tens of thousands of gay men were dying, the federal government looked away for years. The Reagan administration’s indifference to the epidemic was matched, in many pulpits, by moral condemnation of the people dying. Before the first official AIDS report had even been published, evangelical Christian leaders had already delivered a petition to President Jimmy Carter demanding a halt to the advance of gay rights. Bob Jones III predicted, “God’s judgment is going to fall on America as on other societies that allowed homosexuality to become a protected way of life.” In 1993, Reverend Billy Graham asked his audience rhetorically, “Is AIDS a judgment of God?” and answered, “I could not say for sure, but I think so.” Jerry Falwell stated in 1996 that AIDS was “God’s judgment upon the total society for embracing what God has condemned.”
Graham later apologized. But the men dying in hospital rooms while their churches called it divine punishment did not get to hear that apology. And the march for LGBTQ+ civil rights — which had been building through the 1970s — ground nearly to a halt during these years, as the epidemic consumed the movement’s energy and the church provided moral cover for the government’s neglect.
Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, LGBTQ+ people continued to be fired from jobs, denied housing, turned away from churches, and — most lastingly — rejected by their families. The Obergefell decision in 2015 legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, not as a gift from a welcoming culture but as the hard-won result of decades of organizing, litigation, loss, and relentless visibility.
The resistance never stopped. It simply changed forms.
What It Looks Like Now
In 2025, a self-described Christian nationalist pastor named Doug Wilson told CNN that he would like to reinstate anti-sodomy laws — the laws that criminalized gay sex in every state until the Supreme Court struck them down in 2003. When asked directly if he’d like those laws reinstated, he answered: “Yep.”
Wilson praised the 1969 Stonewall raids — the specific police raids that sparked the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement — as the correct model of enforcement: “The way it was enforced is the way I think it ought to be enforced, where they would use the law to shut down a gay bar.”
In February 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — a member of Wilson’s denomination — invited Wilson to preach at the Pentagon as part of a monthly worship series. A photo of Hegseth with his hand on Wilson’s shoulder was posted to social media with the caption: “We are One Nation Under God.”
This is not an isolated figure on the fringe. Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches has affiliated congregations across the country. His books are studied in parent groups. His ideology has shaped a network of Christian schools. And his most extreme positions — recriminalization of gay sex, denial of women’s suffrage, the rollback of same-sex marriage — are now being amplified by the Secretary of Defense to active-duty military personnel.
The question “why do they need a whole month?” has an answer. The answer is June 28, 1969. The answer is the AIDS years and the pastors who called it judgment. The answer is the Pentagon, February 2026.
What Pride Actually Is
Pride Month is loud because it has had to be. It is visible because visibility has been — and continues to be — a form of survival. It is celebratory because the people celebrating have been told, repeatedly and with institutional authority, that they should not exist as they are.
It is also a commemoration. Of the people at the Stonewall Inn who decided one night that enough was enough. Of the men who died during the AIDS crisis while their government looked away and their churches called it deserved. Of the decades of organizing, litigation, and sheer persistence that produced every legal protection that LGBTQ+ people currently hold — protections that are now actively contested by people with access to the Pentagon podium.
There is a pastor preaching against it this Sunday. There probably always will be.
But that pastor is not the reason Pride exists.
The raid is.
Sources: Library of Congress LGBTQIA+ Studies Resource Guide; Britannica; History.com; National Geographic; American University; NYPD Commissioner O’Neill’s 2019 apology; CNN August 2025 Doug Wilson interview; Military Times and Word&Way reporting on the February 2026 Pentagon prayer service.