June is recognized as Pride Month, a time when people of all ages, genders, sexual orientations, and racial identities have a safe place to celebrate LGBTQIA+ Pride. Watershed Voice has compiled a list of resources for local, summer Pride events for Southwest Michigan.
Pride Month
Andrew George of Three Rivers Pride stops by Keep Your Voice Down to chat about the upcoming and first ever Pride Festival in the City of Three Rivers on Saturday, June 24. Andrew, Alek, and Doug talk about how a Pride flag ban protest and the community support it garnered spurred on the creation of Three Rivers Pride Festival, how it all came together in under six months, and details on what to expect at the event.
B.A. Schaaff argues while the U.S. has had some “encouraging wins at the national level” regarding LGBTQ+ rights “[…] there is still more work to do, and our pride can come at a price.”
Friend of Watershed Voice, Emme Zanotti, on Pride: “And that’s what the first Pride was. It was a revolution fueled by the fire of Black trans women and trans Latinas. A revolution generated by the kind of spark and passion that can only exist in the hearts and minds of people on the receiving end of an oppressive force so strong that it’s quite literally costing them their lives. The First Pride was a language of the unheard, to paraphrase Dr. King.
“And through it all, we (white people, yes the gay and trans ones too) tried not to uplift the voices and stories of Black and Brown people, but rather we tried to silence them. For decades we erased their memory from the origin story of Pride. We erased their faces from our dining room tables, and we erased their experiences and wisdom from our decision making tables. The people who have given the most to our cause haven been rewarded the least. I’ll repeat. The people who have given the most to our cause have been rewarded the least.”
The Colon Village Council Tuesday voted 5-2 against a proposed resolution that would have officially recognized June as Pride Month within the Village of Colon.
President Pro-Tem of the Colon Village Council Eddie Leboeuf plans to introduce a resolution tonight to officially recognize June as Pride Month in Colon, a distinction Leboeuf says is long overdue.