Pride Month

Overview

June is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer/Questioning (LGBTQ+) Pride Month! Since it was first recognized on a federal level in 1999, Pride Month has served as a time to celebrate the LGBTQ+ pioneers who fought for equality through art, culture, civic action, community service, and more.

Pride Month is celebrated in June to mark the anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, which began on June 28, 1969. That night, New York City police officers raided The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, a bar where members of the LGBTQ+ community often gathered. Since homosexuality was considered a criminal offense at the time, raids like this were unfortunately common. However, on this historic night, bar patrons and community members banded together to resist the raid. The resulting clash continued for six days, marking a turning point in the fight for LGBTQ+ equality as activists demanded the right to exist and live openly without fear of arrest.

The next year, in June 1970, bisexual activist Brenda Howard organized the first Gay Pride Week and the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade along with a committee of other activists. Her parade evolved into the New York City Pride March that continues to this day, marking the anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising each year, over five decades later. Howard's original parade has also inspired similar celebrations across the country and around the world.

Today, paradegoers are surrounded by rainbows, which have been a symbol for the LGBTQ+ community since 1978, when artist Gilbert Baker designed the original pride flag featuring eight rainbow stripes. His design was later revised to use six stripes, which is now the most commonly used version of the flag.

Newer designs, like the Progress Pride flag, take clear inspiration from Baker’s original rainbow flag. The Progress Pride flag, which was created in 2018 by nonbinary artist Daniel Quasar, represents diversity and inclusion. Qasar’s design adds to the six-stripe flag by including a light blue, pink, and white stripe to represent the trans community, as well as black and brown stripes which represent marginalized LGBTQ+ people of color. The black stripe also honors the lives lost during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1990s.

The theme of NYC Pride for 2025 is "Rise Up: Pride in Protest," which the organization states is “a reflection of the Pride movement’s origins in protest—and is a powerful call to action for our communities and allies to rally and march in defiant celebration, advocacy and solidarity.”

We hope you will join us in celebrating the rich and diverse history of the LGBTQ+ community, both at home in New York and around the world. Throughout June, and all year long, we encourage you to learn more about LGBTQ+ history and history-makers, as well as the ongoing fight for equality, by checking out the resources below, which include events, exhibitions, lesson plans, recommended reading, and more, for use both in and out of the classroom.

Student Supports

The New York City Department of Education supports lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning (LGBTQ+) students, families, and staff across the five boroughs through a variety of policies and programs. For more information, please see our LGBTQ+ Supports page, which also has more information about the Yankees-Stonewall Scholarship for graduating NYC seniors, as well as our Community-Based LGBTQ+ Organizations page. If you have LGBTQ+-related questions or need support at your school, contact LGBTQ@schools.nyc.gov.

Events , Exhibitions, and Places to Visit

• The NYC Pride Parade is Sunday, June 29, 2025! The NYC Pride March is among the largest LGBTQIA+ civil rights demonstrations in the world. The parade starts at 26th St. & 5th Ave. and will disperse at 15th St. & 7th Ave.
  • The main parade takes place in Manhattan, but there are celebrations in every borough: check out The Bronx Pride Festival (Saturday, June 21), Brooklyn Pride (Saturday, June 14), New Queens Pride (Sunday, June 1), and Staten Island PrideFest (Saturday, May 31) for more information about when and where you can celebrate close to home.
• NYC Pride is also hosting Youth Pride, an annual event that provides a safe and inclusive space for young people to freely express themselves, on Saturday, June 28 in the South Street Seaport Historic District (Pier 16 and 17) at 12 PM. Check out their events calendar. for more information about this and other events taking place throughout the month!
• The New York Public Library is celebrating Pride Month throughout June. Check their site for family-friendly events, including film screenings, arts & crafts sessions, book clubs, and more, happening at a branch near you, all month long.
• Many LGBTQ+ pioneers have called New York City home over the years, and you can visit places across all five boroughs where those history-makers lived, worked, and are honored today—like Christopher Street Park across from the Stonewall Inn, the Alice Austen House in Staten Island, or the public murals painted by the artist Keith Haring. For more information about these sites and many others, check out the NYC Parks website. For events taking place throughout June at NYC Parks, see the NYC Parks Pride Month events calendar.
• The Village Preservation Society has created the Civil Rights and Social Justice Map as a guide to LGBTQ+ history in Greenwich Village and the surrounding areas that shows where these sites are located, and provides more information about why each of them is significant to the movement. For even more sites across all five boroughs, check out the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, which has indexed over 400 historically significant locations throughout the city.

Reading List

Throughout the month, and all year long, we encourage families, educators, and students to dive into a book about LGBTQ+ history and experiences. The suggestions below are just a few of our favorite titles, with works of fiction and non-fiction for every grade level that feature characters and perspectives that are often not reflected in other popular works. We hope you will enjoy reading and learning from these outstanding stories.

Many of these books are readily available through the Citywide Digital Library on Sora, which provides free access to hundreds of digital e-books and audiobooks for our students, including those in the Come as You Are collection, which features a range of contemporary and historical titles concerning LGBTQ+ topics, characters, and events, including fiction and non-fiction works. For even more great titles, check out Pride at NYPL, which includes LGBTQ+-centered book lists for all ages recommended by the New York Public Library.

Video and Audio Resources

• The ACT UP Oral History Project is an archive of 187 interviews with members of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York. Founded in March of 1987, ACT UP is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals, united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis. Its determined advocacy and highly focused demonstrations supported by innovative graphics utterly changed the world’s perception of people with AIDS and queer people.
• The NYC Trans Oral History Project is a community archive devoted to the collection, preservation and sharing of trans histories, organized in collaboration with the New York Public Library. The archive documents transgender resistance and resilience in New York City.
• The Village Preservation Society Oral History Collection has a collection of LGBTQ+ Oral Histories that include some of the great artists, activists, business owners, community leaders, and preservation pioneers of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo, which capture their first-person perspective on the important histories they witnessed or of which they were a part.
• The Stonewall Uprising Interviews Collection, part of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting’s 2011 American Experience documentary, contains 48 interviews which offer a firsthand perspective on the LGBTQ+ community’s six days of protests that erupted after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.
• Learn about the largely hidden history of the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement directly from the voices of the people who lived it in the Making Gay History Podcast series.
• QueerSpace is a podcast series created by the National Air and Space Museum that features stories and people at the intersection of aviation, space, and LGBTQ+ culture.

Resources for Educators

• The Recognized comics are a graphic history series created in collaboration with Good Trouble Comics that are available on WeTeach. The comics tell the stories of important LGBTQ+ figures from New York. Volume 1 teaches about Alain Locke and Sylvia Rivera, and Volume 2 focuses on Bayard Rustin and Larry Kramer.
• Also available on WeTeach, “Yes! But How? LGBTQ+ Inclusion for Educators” is a collaborative project between our Office of Safety and Youth Development and the Office of Curriculum, Instruction, and Professional Learning that aims to help K–12 teachers and administrators support the development of LGBTQ+ inclusive and affirming school environments that was written by LGBTQ+ author and curator Hugh Ryan.
• The History UnErased Curriculum, available to NYC educators, was created to put LGBTQ+ History in the classroom. It aims to ensure that all students learn a more complete story of America and a more accurate reflection of who “We the people” includes, while promoting a genuine understanding and equality for all LGBTQ+ people.
• The New-York Historical Society’s “Women and the American Story” curricular resources include profiles of significant and often overlooked women throughout U.S. history, including LGBTQ+ advocates and history-makers like Billie Jean King and Marsha P. Johnson, among others.
• Celebrate Pride Month with digital resources from the Smithsonian that come from many of their museums, including the American Women’s History Museum, the National Air and Space Museum, the American Art Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, and more.
• The National Educator’s Association has a number of helpful resources available for teachers, including their LGBTQ+ Resource Page that was designed to provide educators with the information and tools they would need to support LGBTQ+ students, to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ history in their classrooms, and to stop LGBTQ+ bias and intolerance in public schools.
• Facing History and Ourselves also has a comprehensive list of resources that aim to help educators ensure that LGBTQ+ histories and experiences are centered throughout the year.
• Several relevant lesson plans for middle and high school classrooms are available online through the Museum of the City of New York, including:
  • “When Existence is Resistance: Transgender Activism, 1969–2019,” which allows students to explore 50 years of documents, photographs, and objects related to trans activism to learn about the role trans individuals have played in the gay liberation movement and the specific challenges trans New Yorkers have faced both historically and today.
  • “Gay is Good: Civil Rights for Fays and Lesbians 1969–2011,” which uses flyers created in the wake of the Stonewall Uprising to help students learn about different LGBTQ+ rights organizations and the varying goals and strategies they used to bring about change.
• Students can learn more about the history of Pride Month with primary sources, documentary footage, and more from the Library of Congress.
• Many resources are also available on Newsela, including:
  • Celebrating Pride Month: An Introduction to the LGBTQIA+ Community,
  • Celebrating Pride Month: Arts and Sciences, and
  • The Stonewall Riots: A Catalyst for the LGBT Rights Movement, among many other articles and instructional sets.
• The National Endowment for the Humanities has put together a “Virtual Bookshelf” with NEH-funded resources and projects related to LGBTQ+ history.
• The Zinn Education Project has a number of educator resources available on their website, including classroom activities, book lists, recommended films, and more.

Hidden Voices

Hidden Voices began as a collaboration with the Museum of the City of New York that was initiated to help NYC students learn about and honor the countless individuals who are often “hidden” from the traditional historical record. Each of the people highlighted in the series have made a positive impact on their communities while serving as outstanding examples of leadership, advocacy, and community service. There are several curriculum options available through WeTeach that are especially relevant during Pride Month, including:

• Untold Stories in New York City History, which includes profiles of significant LGBTQ+ New Yorkers, including Jennie June, one of the earliest advocates for sexual and gender minorities in New York, and Larry Kramer, known for founding two groups—the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP—that reshaped community and government responses to AIDS.
• LGBTQ+ Stories in United States History, which features profiles of LGBTQ+ individuals throughout different eras in U.S. history.
  • In conjunction with those lesson plans, there are corresponding video resources for grades 6–12 that are aligned with the Hidden Voices curriculum, and provide additional information on the individuals and events that are spotlighted in the lesson plans.
• Asian American and Pacific Islanders in United States History, which features the story of Helen Zia, an author, journalist, activist, and leader in the fight for Asian American and LGBTQ+ rights. 

In addition to these lessons, we regularly feature profiles on history-making individuals who could be considered to be “hidden voices.” During Pride Month, check out our profiles on:

• Edie Windsor, a computer programmer and pioneering LGBTQ+ activist best known for her role in the landmark Supreme Court case, United States v. Windsor, that helped lead towards the eventual legalization of gay marriage in the United States.

You can find more of our profiles throughout the year on our Hidden Voices webpage.