At the beginning of Pride Month last year, Black queer writer and sex educator Ericka Hart posted on Threads: “Queerness is a playground of possibility. It doesn’t put parameters on how you are supposed to be in order to be. You don’t need proof. No explanation. No executive order. No invasive chromosome test. Queerness just is.”
In many cities and communities across the country, Pride Month has become synonymous with loud parades and rainbow flags. Often, however, the historical roots of the celebration are left by the wayside. The first Pride march took place in June 1970 to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, when New York City police raided an already often-harassed gay bar called the Stonewall Inn, leading to a series of clashes between police and LGBTQ+ protesters. As the Library of Congress research guide on Stonewall points out, “Historians have noted that the shift in activism, if Stonewall truly represented one at all, was a shift primarily for white cisgender people, as people of color and gender non-conforming people never truly had the benefit of concealing their marginalized identities.”
Fifty-seven years after Stonewall, we’re reflecting on this history—and the continued resilience of the queer community—amid a barrage of attacks on LGBTQ+ people, especially trans folks, coming from the Trump Administration together with many state governments across the country. In so doing, it’s abundantly clear that there is no one way to experience queerness, nor any singular way to write about it. In this issue of The Progressive, it was important for us to acknowledge the pervasive and frightening threats to LGBTQ+ people. We also wanted to champion the efforts of queer people to love and protect each other in the face of a political and social environment that can feel suffocating.
Courtney Blackmer-Raynolds reports on how anti-trans laws across the country are driving families to relocate to states safer for LGBTQ+ people. Grace Mayer writes about the attacks on gender-affirming care for trans minors and adults, and Mira Nalbandian analyzes how the U.S. Supreme Court is jeopardizing queer people’s rights after the Dobbs decision. Ashley C. Rondini outlines how and why anti-trans political rhetoric is so harmful, and how it fuels violence against trans people while falsely accusing them of the same violence. The Reverend Irene Monroe writes about the use of theopolitics to curtail the right to same-sex marriage, through the lens of an ordained minister, while Tausif Sanzum describes his experience as a gay immigrant of color in the United States under an increasingly white Christian nationalist government. Matt Minton documents how queer journalists navigate hostility while adapting to a constantly changing media landscape.
Plus, Noella Williams describes the magic of young and queer people organizing in Florida despite the state’s hostility toward them. Michaela Brant speaks with Joan Ilacqua from the community archives project Queer History Boston about the importance of seeing ourselves in queer history and the ways that the organization is commemorating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Zoë Takaki features Babe’s, a sports bar in Chicago, Illinois, that exclusively shows women’s sports and provides an LGBTQ+-affirming space.
In a 2018 speech that has recently gone viral online, actress Anne Hathaway tells a young transgender fan who commended her for her bravery as an ally to trans people: “Ella sweetie, I want to make something absolutely clear to you: It takes zero courage to love you.” We at The Progressive wholeheartedly agree. To our LGBTQ+ readers: We see you and appreciate you. You deserve a country and a world that honors your rights and embraces you, exactly as you are. We hope you can see your own worries, strengths, history, and joy in these pages.
We’ll leave you with words from Hart, who in that same Threads post from June 2025 continued, “Queerness is antithetical to capitalism, anti-Black racism, intimate partner violence, genocide, houselessness, transphobia, cis[gender] heteronormativity. Queerness is communal . . . . A riot against everything that poses a barrier. Queerness is love, radically.”