In June 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, one of the few places where queer and trans people could gather. The uprising that followed wasn’t the first act of queer/trans resistance, and it wasn’t the last. But it became a symbol, not of unity or safety, but of refusal. Refusal to stay quiet. Refusal to apologize. Refusal to disappear back into the closet.
Since then, people have celebrated Pride in many ways, from street protests and marches to dance parties and vigils. But more and more, Pride events are being bought out and controlled by funders, corporations, and institutions that do not share the values of Pride’s radical roots and LGBTQIA2S+ liberation. Pride isn’t about being palatable. It’s about survival, community, and resisting state violence.
In Florida right now, Pride isn’t simple. Trans people are being criminalized. Queer books are being banned. Drag shows are being targeted. Kids are being pushed into silence. In a state where queer and trans people face daily political attacks, this kind of depoliticized Pride isn’t just hollow, it’s harmful.
That’s why activists are organizing to take it back. In St. Pete, queer and trans community members are pushing back against the corporate influence, exclusion, and erasure they see in official Pride events. They’re demanding a return to Pride’s revolutionary roots.
Meet the Gay People Protesting St. Pete Pride
The Lavender Menace
In 1970, a group of lesbians disrupted the Second Congress to Unite Women by walking into the event wearing shirts that read “Lavender Menace.” The phrase had been used by a National Organization for Women (NOW) leader to describe the supposed “threat” lesbian activists posed to the feminist movement. Rather than shrink from the insult, these organizers embraced it, demanding visibility, voice, and a feminism that didn’t throw lesbians under the bus for the sake of palatability.
Their action forced a long-overdue conversation about the erasure of lesbian concerns from mainstream feminist agendas. At the time, many feminist leaders, including those in NOW, feared that association with lesbians would delegitimize the movement. But queer women were already leading the work. They had been organizing shelters, fighting for abortion access, and pushing back on patriarchal violence within the home, the state, and the workplace.
This history isn’t just about the past. Today, lesbians, butch women, bisexuals, nonbinary people, and trans people still face many of the same gender presentation pressures: being told they’re “confused” and “too disruptive” to belong or to fight for. They’re socially and systemically punished for not fitting into narrow physical gender presentations, often targeted by both transmisogyny and homophobia. From bathroom bans to attacks on gender-affirming care to the silencing of queer sex ed, these assaults follow a long pattern of punishing gender nonconformity, and trying to erase anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into rigid, heterosexual, cisgender expectations.
NOW’s history includes both the harm and the healing. Some chapters turned their backs on queer women. Others became spaces where lesbian, bisexual, and transgender feminists built power together. Today, at Florida NOW, we believe in a feminism that refuses to compromise with heteropatriarchy, a feminism that remembers who was pushed out, and refuses to leave anyone behind.
Gender justice means all of us.
