Writing Better Pride Copy: No Rainbows Without the Rain

Welcome to the next installment of our series on improving your pride copy. In the last posts, we went through three tips to improve your pride copy. We dove deeper into how to research your local queer community, and then I walked you through how I would start researching the queer community in San Antonio, Texas. 

Now we’re moving onto the second tip to writing better pride copy: don’t ignore the history of pride and issues the community faces now. 

I see a lot of pride copy that is only sunshine and rainbows. Sunshine and rainbows are great, but when there is never any acknowledgement of how far we have come or how far we have to go as a community, the sunshine and rainbows seem faded. In a future post, I’ll explain Rainbow Washing and why it’s important to avoid doing that. So keep an eye out!

In this blog, I’m going to give you some important history of the queer rights movement. Then I’ll give you a sample of issues currently facing the community. And then I’ll explain how you can incorporate these things into your pride copy so that you acknowledge them without losing the celebration aspect of Pride Month.

If you’re looking for a pride copywriter to handle all your pride copy needs or to provide advice and feedback on the pride copy you already have, book a 15 minute call with me. We’ll discuss your goals and how I can take your pride copy to the next level. 

Important History to Know for Your Pride Copy: The Fight for Our Rights and Our Lives

The First Pride March Commemorated a Riot and Uprising

The first pride parade was held in 1970 to commemorate an event that happened in 1969. On June 28, 1969, the NYPD raided a local queer bar in Greenwich Village called the Stonewall Inn. This was not the first raid on a queer establishment, and it would not be the last. 

The story of Stonewall is that when the police started arresting people, Storme DeLarverie - a butch lesbian being shoved into a police vehicle - shouted out “Aren’t you going to do something?” And someone did. Someone threw a brick. That someone was likely Sylvia Rivera, a transwoman of color. Historical accounts of exactly what happened are not clear, but what is clear is that the crowd exploded and fought back against police oppression and violence. 

Ultimately, the uprising encompassed six non-consecutive days. 

From that first uprising, the next year gay activist organized a commemoration parade of the uprising. And that is what started pride pride parade and pride month. We are celebrating and making sure our voices are heard again and again, year after year after year.

The Movement Started Long Before Pride

It’s also important to remember that this uprising was not the beginning of the gay rights movement. Queer people have been organizing and seeking change for at least decades. Organizations such as Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis sought to achieve employment equality. 

Pride Interrupted: The AIDS Crisis and the Loss of a Generation

In the wake of this newfound liberation, a crisis came to the community. In the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic killed hundreds of thousands of people, largely gay men. And the government did nothing. And worse, the Reagan Administration laughed. Ronald Reagan himself didn’t even say the word AIDS until 1985, four years after the crisis became known and despite thousands of Americans dying horrific deaths around him. I want to recommend And The Band Played On, a book and a movie, if you want to learn more. 

And here’s why this is a really important part of queer history: our community was devastated by this disease. One in 10 gay men died from AIDS until effective anti-viral medications became available in the late 1990s. But the community did not stay silent or wait for action. One organization that came into being as a result of the crisis is ACTUP to call attention to the crisis and demand government action. Another was the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) to provide resources, education, and engage in activism around the crisis.

The Long Road to Marriage Equality

As you probably know, in 2015 the Supreme Court issued a decision written by former-Justice Kennedy that legalized marriage between people of the same sex across the nation. Having marriage equality is important for so many reasons, both emotional and practical. Prior to this decision, for example, partners of people in hospitals could be refused visitation because they are not legally family. Imagine having the most important person in your life sick in the hospital and not being allowed to be by their side. 

Marriage equality to decades of dedicated work by activists to achieve. Their work faced the usual (aka homophobic) obstacles. The federal government passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996. State governments passed laws restricting marriage to heterosexual couples.

Despite these obstacles, the activists kept at it. First, civil unions began to spread as an option for same sex couples. Then, starting with Massachusetts (and with many set-backs along the way), marriage equality became legal in various states. Then came the Supreme Court decisions that undid part of DOMA in 2013 (United States v. Windsor) and legalized marriage equality nationally in 2015 (Obergefell v. Hodges). 

And Fight Goes On: Some Current Issues Facing the Queer Community

The queer community has made such amazing progress, and that is something to celebrate. And it is also true that we have much farther to go to achieve full equality. 

Our transgender and gender diverse siblings are facing unprecedented legislative attacks. From bans on drag shows to blocking transgender teens from accessing age-appropriate, science-supported, and gender sensitive medical care. Trans teens can’t even get a break when it comes to playing sports! And all this without even touching on the heightened risk of violence faced by trans folks.

The community worries about the rollback of our rights. With a Supreme Court so willing to discard its own precedents, the Obergefell case could be overturned as flippantly as Roe v. Wade was. These risks are not even hypothetical. The UN has warned that our rights are already being eroded at the state level and called upon the federal government to take steps to provide more protections. 

And then there are local issues. As we saw in the blog on the San Antonio queer community, monkeypox and access to the vaccine is an issue facing that community. 

The work continues because it has to. And it’s important to acknowledge that in your Pride copy.

How to Incorporate This Into Your Pride Copy Without Turning Into A Debbie Downer

So this is a lot of history and a lot of issues that face the queer community. And it can all be a downer, which generally is not what you are looking to have in your Pride copy. How do you incorporate it without sapping your copy of the celebration of Pride? 

What you want to do is incorporate it into your overall Pride copy strategy. That way, you can acknowledge the history and the issues, but you don’t have to do so in every piece of copy you put out there. 

Are you using social media posts? Make one of your posts celebrating a key person in the Stonewall Riot and use that to talk about the history while celebrating Pride. Are you doing blogs? Write a blog post highlighting all the work being done on the issues facing the trans community. Are you doing emails? Send an email celebrating the ninth anniversary of marriage equality and admiring the activists involved in getting that decision. You can celebrate all the work done and obstacles overcome while celebrating Pride. 

And if you’re looking for a Pride Copywriter who can give you feedback on your copy or to work with your current marketing team to write your pride copy, click on the link to schedule a 15 minute call. Let’s talk about what your goals are to connect with the queer community and how I can help you reach them!

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