Once a year, people line the streets of their respective cities while decked out in various flags and rainbow gear to celebrate Pride Month, which kicked off on June 1.
Since 1970, members of the LGBTQ+ community have been banning together to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall Inn Riots. Pride originally started out as a peaceful march where attendees could show up to express themselves and their sexuality freely. Over the years, these marches have evolved into parades.
These parades are held in major cities across the country. Over the years, the parades have gotten bigger and bigger, earning millions of attendees. In New York City, for example, the 2023 Pride events averaged two million people, according to The New York Times, while the biggest parade is in Sao Paulo, Brazil. But not everyone has immediate access to a city, and for others, the parades might get too overwhelming and crowded. This doesn’t mean celebrating the month needs to be overlooked.
Here are some ways to celebrate Pride month if you live in a small town or don’t want to attend a parade.
Host your own event
There is no right or wrong way to celebrate Pride, so if your town isn’t offering any kind of celebration, you can create your own.
This could be something as simple as doing an LGBTQ+ trivia night filled with history, or even doing a marathon of queer-centric movies or television shows. If you want to go bigger, you and your friends could do a small march around your neighborhood.
Show your support online
There are plenty of charities that support the LGBTQ+ community. Some are focused on the goal of creating more LGBTQ+ representation in media like GLAAD, while others, such as the Trevor Project, focus on mental health awareness and suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth.
If you’re looking for a more low-key way to celebrate the month, you could either donate to a charity of your choice privately or set up a donation on Facebook for any of your friends on the platform as well.
Fundraisers
This could be as simple as a lemonade stand or car wash, or you can go as complex as making friendship bracelets or crocheting.
Another idea is to make some sort of Pride-themed craft using the iconic rainbow symbol and using the proceeds to donate to any Pride or LGBTQ+ centric charity.
Attend a virtual parade
If you are after the atmosphere that a Pride parade provides, a lot of them are available to be live-streamed. For example, there is more than three hours of footage from New York City’s 2023 Pride Parade, so why not invite some friends over and have the footage playing in the background.
Pride playlists
Another idea that can be done either by yourself or with friends is to celebrate all of the queer musicians that you love. You can get your friends involved by having each person pick out a song by an LGTBQ+ artist or a song that you think represents Pride as a whole.
Pride book club
If you’re a reader, you could celebrate the month by either reading a novel or memoir that focuses on LGBTQ+ related themes or written by a queer author or both. One example could be The Well of Loneliness, which is the first mainstream novel about lesbianism, and which has been censored and banned in many places since its publication, according to PBS. Published in 1928, the novel by British author Radclyffe Hall examines the feelings of isolation and loneliness that LGBTQ+ people can feel in a heteronormative society.
Book banning attempts have increased recently, with public school book ban attempts spiking by 33 percent within the last school year compared to the previous year, according to free speech advocacy group PEN America. The report discovered that 40 attempts to ban book were made in the state of Florida. Some of the banned books, such as Gender Queer, detail the lives of queer individuals.
Banning books has gone hand in hand with the increase in laws that target LGBTQ+ individuals. For example, 11 states now have laws dictating what teachers can say about LGBTQ+ issues, according to NBC.
