Beyond the Rainbow
One Queer Teacher’s Take on How to Celebrate Pride
Amid the flurry of rainbow shirts and Facebook filters that pop up this time of year, most people don’t know why we celebrate Pride month in June. On June 28, 1969, a bunch of queers, led mostly by women of color, fought back against police brutality at The Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Despite the colorful floats emblazoned with corporate logos you’ll see puttering down Christopher Street this weekend, Pride isn’t just a celebration; it’s a call to action against injustice.
And it doesn’t stop at justice for the LGBTQIA+ community. As Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson, one of the heroes of Stonewall, once said, “No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.”
As someone who has been out as queer for half of my life now, I feel some pressure to be exceedingly joyful this month, but lately Johnson’s words have been making that hard for me to pull off. We have always been tragically far from collective liberation, but these days that seems more obvious than ever. What right do I have to celebrate in the wake of an unfolding genocide in Palestine, a spike in anti-Semitic and other hate crimes, an assault on reproductive rights, too many brutal examples of racism against BIPOC individuals and immigrants in our communities, and countless other examples of neighbors struggling to be free?
If you, like me, could use an extra dose of inspiration to answer Johnson’s call this Pride, here’s my suggestion: look to the next generation. As a teacher and Speech & Debate coach in NYC public schools for 13 years, I had the privilege of meeting phenomenal young people who were so much more courageous than I was at their age. Now, as the Executive Director of Brooklyn Debate League, a nonprofit organization radically expanding access to Speech & Debate to more NYC public schools, I get to meet more and more inspirational teens every day. This Pride, I’d like to tell you about some of them with the hope that their stories inspire you to work towards the world Johnson was envisioning.
In 2016, one of my students called me at 6am the morning after Election Day and told me she was afraid to go to school, because what if while she was there, someone came and took away her undocumented mother the way they had already taken away her father. She wrote a speech that year about how the same kind of implicit bias that led to someone calling the cops on her Mexican dad led to the murders of scores of innocent Black Americans including Amadou Diallo, Sandra Bland and Trayvon Martin. (She graduated from Yale and will be teaching low-income students this fall as a Teach for America corps member.)
In 2017, I took a group of students to Columbia University’s national Speech & Debate invitational the day after Trump’s inauguration. In between rounds, they headed downtown and joined the Women’s March. When they came back to campus, they proudly delivered speeches about how systemic racism was hurting their communities. One of them presented “Why Black Lives Matter” by BLM co-founder Alicia Garza, and even though people rolled their eyes at her during her performance, she won the tournament anyway. (She just graduated as valedictorian from Virginia State University.)
That same year, one of them wrote a speech reflecting on his male privilege in the wake of the recent horrific sexual assaults on college campuses. He delivered his message on stages across the country and pushed other men to use their male privilege to be feminists. (He has been teaching in low-income public schools for the last three years and leads Brothers in Leadership, a group specifically dedicated to building up community among Black and Brown young men.)
In 2019, one of them became my first student to win the Harvard tournament with a speech about how America only ever portrayed her Nigerian homeland and other African countries in a condescending light. (She called me years later from her dorm room in Buffalo and told me she was about to go to Tops when she decided to go to the other supermarket down the street, about ten minutes before a white supremacist opened fire on Black shoppers. She just graduated in June and is now studying for the LSAT.)
Later that year, one of them became the first Black woman with cerebral palsy to win the New York State Championship with a speech pushing able-bodied people to address ableism, push for inclusivity, and of course, check their uncomfortability whenever they see someone with a disability. (She is now pursuing her Master’s degree in Social Work at Columbia University.)
In 2020, one of them grabbed the microphone at a BLM protest outside Barclay’s Center and shared how unacceptable it was that she was scared for her life when cops harassed her and her friends on their way to school. (She is now a rising senior at Brandeis.)
In 2022, one of them published an op-ed speaking out against New York State’s decision to cancel the US History Regents Examination for fear that some of the content might be triggering to students given the recent mass shooting in Buffalo. They called on our leaders to focus on the real problem of gun violence instead of assuming that our troubled history with gun violence was too much for kids like them to handle. (They are now a rising sophomore at Wesleyan.)
That same year, one of them bravely told the story about his journey from homeless shelters to a full ride to college on Humans of New York and then published his memoir I Wasn’t Supposed To Be Here. (He co-founded Brooklyn Debate League with me and has since spoken to hundreds of students around the country.)
The relentlessly devastating headlines may make it difficult for any of us to be truly joyful this weekend, but remember that Stonewall wasn’t a party: it was a riot. The courage of these students and thousands more like them who are fighting for the rights of marginalized communities honors the true legacy of Stonewall better than any rainbow shirts ever could. May their example inspire us to work towards a world of collective liberation and live up to the true spirit of Pride.
