‘Started as a Riot’: In Defense of an Uncivil Pride

In discussing queer Pride every year, a line that’s nearly become a trope is “Pride was a riot.” We see celebrations of the 1969 Stonewall uprising — a three day series of riots — against police brutality plastered across both corporate and individual spheres of influence, alongside brief acknowledgements to Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera for their roles in the resistance. They’re celebrated as queer folk heroes, their image taken beyond that of individuals, now utilized as the embodiment of queer joy, rebellion, and freedom.

Yet, in using them as depictions of Pride, many seem to forget their actual actions, let alone what they stood for in queer and trans history.

Cincinnati Pride, for instance, proudly boasts as to how it welcomes cops, with, in my own experience, corporate stands placed around the event. Chicago Pride saw police actively participate in the “safety planning” of the event, leading to the arrests of over 30 people, including five children. Last year’s Pride parade in Austin -- held in August – saw police marching, in spite of the department brutally assaulting and arresting a local trans woman a few months before. New York City Pride, which famously banned uniformed officers from attending in 2021, nevertheless found themselves at the sidelines of this year’s celebration, with Pride organizers previously stating they’re “welcome” if they don’t bring weapons and are out of uniform.

Without a hint of irony, the parade marched by the location of the defiantly anti-police Stonewall riots decades before.

The irony is palpable.

It unfortunately comes as little surprise, then, that as the Trump regime explicitly threatens to kill radical activists, this year’s Pride was marked by a wave of police brutality against queer people across the country, including in supposedly “safe” cities. Too often the cops have carried out this violence with gay or trans gentry excusing or even actively cheering these crackdowns, typically followed by establishment media figures.

I want to highlight not only the ways in which people have very recently resisted this brutality, but that people have built separate institutions that serve the community, and offer folks a blueprint for how Pride ought to be, despite queer and trans gentry lecturing them not to.

This is a particularly notable problem that infects Pride events across the country. Many have come into the historically inaccurate view that gentry groups played an equally instrumental role in achieving rights as to the people rioting in the streets. This myth is not only false, but it leads to an active co-option of Pride events by the gentry, and is how we end up with weapons manufacturers having booths at their local Pride parade. Fortunately, people are increasingly pushing back against this lie.

The following are three examples from across the country that reflect both the brutal crackdowns Pride celebrations faced and the growing sentiment that liberation is only going to come from the bottom-up.

Philadelphia’s Fight Against Bigotry

This year’s official Philly Pride got off to a rocky start. After being moved out of the city’s gay neighborhood – dubbed the Gayborhood – the official Pride event saw numerous logistical issues stack up with a populace righteously angry that they changed the location to a sanitized environment outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“There wasn't shade, water cost way too much money, there were horrible corporate sponsors who are complicit in the genocide in Gaza there,” Grace, a member of the local activist group Trans United Front, told Trans News Network. “Any number of bad things were going on there that made people want to just go to the normal gay bars and have fun with their friends on pride. Pride is worth celebrating and people need that, especially given the current homophobic climate in this country.”

In response, people started showing up to an organic celebration in the Gayborhood, and the police decided to retaliate by brutalizing the populace. They put up barricades, sent in hundreds of police officers on horses and motorcycles to block off pedestrian walkways, and came equipped with batons, pepper spray, and tasers, showing no remorse as they assaulted people while pushing them off the street. One person was almost trampled by the horses.

Numerous people came forward, revealing that police shouted phrases like “party’s over” and “If you don’t leave there will be no mercy” at an already terrified populace, who were barricaded in a small block with hundreds of others in sweltering heat.

“Several police had on face masks, which is even against their own code of conduct, and a part of me wonders if that's because they are gay and are trying to hide that they're complicit in this horrific homophobia and violence,” Grace said. “The core of it is that the people were enjoying Pride as they always have, as they have year after year.

“The police didn't take precautions, didn't close down streets like they usually do in the Gayborhood during pride, and then used the sort of party that always happens during pride to justify cracking down on the gay community in Philly,” she continued.

Grace continued, noting that many of the victims were Black women, which is supported by numerous photos and videos of these very assaults. The Philadelphia Police Department has a long well-documented history of extreme, vile racism. Perhaps the most notorious example is the 1985 MOVE bombing, in which they dropped a military-grade bomb on a Black neighborhood, killing five children and six adults as well as injuring numerous more, and leaving countless homeless. There is a similar, detailed history of outright violence and discrimination against the city’s queer community.

“That [history] came out here, combined with homophobia, to really brutalize some of the most vulnerable people,” Grace told TNN. “I mean, I heard more than a dozen people were arrested, people were tased for just standing out of the way in the parking lot, not doing anything illegal. It was really horrible, and the community was rightfully upset.”

After a lackluster response from officials, residents of the city had enough.

“Trans United Front decided to step up and organize a real response,” she recalled. “A day later, we had a rally in the Gayborhood, one that the police tried very strongly to control and to shut down. There were several points during that rally where I thought that we were all going to be kettled and mass arrested, given the history of how the Philadelphia Police Department cracks down on free speech and expression.”

Fortunately, no such repression occurred. Instead, they saw something much more powerful: residents of the area spontaneously joined their march.

“We ended up marching through the Gayborhood, and I was really struck by how many people organically came out into the streets from their homes, from the cafes, from the gay bars, to join because they were upset,” she said. “We marched on the [Philadelphia Police Department] station, the main station for the city. We had speeches, we had a community megaphone where people got to share the crimes that happened during pride from the PPD directly. It was a really inspiring moment where the community stood up for itself and fought back against police terror.”

“We really proved in practice that pride doesn't come from nonprofits that work with the city and the police to make a ‘safe’ pedestrian parade. It comes from the people. It comes from the masses of gay people who are standing up for their right to be out and proud. We're here and we're queer and we're not going anywhere.“

The momentum didn’t end there.

“About a week afterwards we held a mass meeting that had a nice attendance, more than two dozen people, a lot of whom were kind of activated by that March on Pride,” Grace remembered. “We've had several new members join TUF who were a part of that rally. It's been really heartening to see how the community can connect with the activists, because I think that there's been for a long time a real sort of separation between the organized left and the people, both in the gay community and more broadly.”

This disconnect isn’t without a source or a cause. Grace reports that many in Philadelphia were misled by nonprofits and more liberal groups that prioritized reforms and political campaigns, including that of Mayor Cherelle Parker, who supported the police department, rather than the public they’d terrorized, after Pride.

“I think this speaks to the need for people to stand up on their own and take action for themselves, and how inspiring that can be. Real change doesn't come from begging a politician to make things better, pass some law, investigate some cop, which usually just means letting the cops investigate themselves,” she recounted. “It comes from the people themselves standing up and demanding better. Everything you win at the negotiating table, you've already won on the battlefield.”

Prior to this, Trans United Front was largely focused on insular mutual aid efforts, but now they’re currently researching and investigating new methods they can take on to “go on the offense” and better protect marginalized people in their area. These methods include political education of liberatory history, resisting militarized drones, pushing back against police violence, organizing unions, and continuing to support trans people across the city.

“Most hospitals in the city have dropped all hormone-related care for people who are under-19, including adults, and they're doing this complying in advance with executive orders that have been given injunctions. Some clinics have gone even further and just fully stopped covering uh hormone replacement therapy even for adults,” Grace said. “We’re reaching out to do solidarity work with incarcerated trans people who face daily violence in the prison system that particularly exploits transgender people, especially trans women who are often forced into effective sexual slavery in prisons.”

“We're also consciously trying to reach out and connect with the people outside of prisons who face the sort of harshest realities of trans people, particularly survival sex workers in the city.”

Grace is also aware that they’ll likely face retaliation from local police and the federal government.

“I think it's always possible that the police and federal government step in, particularly in the world. NSPM 7 was released by the Trump administration, like a natural national security directive that explicitly says that “gender extremism” is something they're investigating into terrorism, which is crazy!,” she said. “As well as labeling anti-fascist groups as terrorists, which kind of openly belies how fascist the government of this country has become that they view anti-fascists as anti-government.”

“That's always a concern, and one that we shouldn't ignore, but that shouldn't stop us from taking action. I think the point of these sort of repressive actions is to make people quietly accept the erasing of rights, the murder of the innocent, the crackdown of democracy and civil society in this country that has been happening for years now. A key typing we are going to do is not let that stop us.”

She also issued a warning for queer people: beware “Gay Inc,” the well-heeled and influential nonprofits that serve as agents of the status quo.

“The other concern is like from what I would call the ‘right-wing of the queer movement,’ the sort of well-paid nonprofits and NGOs that have a vested interest in calming down the queer community and supporting rainbow capitalism or slightly less bad elected candidates with all of their effort who often kind of call any real action divisive or dangerous or radical,” Grace emphasizes. “They often pair it with right-wing narratives about ‘outside agitators’ that ultimately show that they don't trust the people they claim to represent.”

“The history of the gay movement since its high watermark in the ‘60s and the ‘70s is one of co-optation. Pride started as a riot, and we need to remember that history. It was a riot that was started by trans women and by street kids, the homeless, prostitutes in New York City who were facing real oppression every day from the police,” she said.

“It's turned into a celebration and I'm glad that we celebrate. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be trans, but we need to remember that it started with standing up for our rights. And when certain groups say that we need to stand up for our rights in a certain way in a certain place, peacefully at all costs without attacking the Democrats because ‘well they're slightly better than the Republicans for us.’ We view that as an enemy of queer people in the movement's queer liberation as well. And so that's one of the sort of things that we're struggling against.”

Trans United Front is a subset of the broader group Philly Socialists. They have a detailed list of ways to get involved in their organizing on their website for those in the local area.

SF Trans March Pushes Back

The crackdown on Pride events in San Francisco gained much more attention across the nation after police violently arrested several people at the San Francisco Trans March. The next night, cops deployed riot gear as they arrested 20 unarmed people at a block party. The following night, they harassed numerous vendors at the official San Francisco Pride event.

Much of this came after people protested the presence of state Sen. Scott Weiner, who has been vocally pro-Israeli regime and spent the past few years supporting exclusion, firings, and crackdowns of those who are vocally pro-Palestine. Weiner, who emerged from the event without any physical injuries, claimed to have been harassed and physically threatened, spawning a great deal of these arrests and crackdown from local officials.

Wiener is currently running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat in the House, and has been criticized for furthering gentrification of working class, BIPOC, and queer neighborhoods.

Notably, the resistance to politicians at Pride events is hardly new, as many of them have played instrumental roles in cracking down against radical queers. There is also a long tradition of heckling any politician who tries to co-opt Pride for their own political campaigns.

The alleged threats against Weiner spawned a slew of media coverage sympathetic to him, falsely asserting the criticisms of him were antisemitic, in spite of reporting from Truthout showing that it was simply people who demanded he say ‘Free Palestine.’ This sympathetic coverage even extended to the ostensibly pro-trans outlet Assigned Media, whose founder, Evan Urquhart, wrote a piece defending Wiener in the police crackdown’s aftermath, before partially walking it back a few weeks later.

Wiener has, as of this year, taken money from pro-Israeli regime donors. His website displays a both-sides approach to Israel and Palestine, and his history of supporting Israel has been criticized by leftists for years, including co-authoring his authoring of repressive pro-Israel bills.

“The police formed this line and started pushing people back. At one point they even got past the vendors and they mistook one of the vendors for an attendee and misgendered them and tried to make them leave,” Niko Storment, one of the co-directors of the grassroots San Francisco Trans March, who was present at the city’s official Pride event, told Trans News Network. “They did end up working that out, but you can see the kind of dynamics culturally that exists in the space between the police and queer people.

“I do think that there is something deeper going on here, and I don't think that at this point I'm able to say that trans people are safe around police,” they emphasized. “As the Trans March, we are going to pursue further restrictions on SFPD presence at our event.”

Storment reported how at the SF Trans March, police arrested someone for damaging a Flock AI security camera. This erupted into pure chaos as the police escalated the situation, violently arresting numerous people who came to the protester’s defense.

Despite the city’s reputation as a queer haven, this tumultuous relationship between the city’s queer residents and the police is nothing new. Trans News Network previously wrote about the 1979 White Night riots following the former police officer Dan White’s light sentence for murdering the country’s first openly gay politician, Harvey Milk. These riots gained such a level of popular support that even to this day, many centrist Democrats are forced to admit that the queer populace was correct in doing so, that the riots were effective in fighting city government’s bigoted status quo and that police action against them was wildly inappropriate.

The California Migration Museum has also described these histories in great detail, and a recent investigation by UC Berkeley researcher Nan Alamilla Boyd notes that much of the persecution against the queer community became a playbook for wider state repression.

Storment himself noted the example of Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, which took place a year before Stonewall. Participants described being tired of “being arrested for nothing,” and after a trans woman threw hot coffee in a cop’s face following his attempts to arrest her, people stood up and fought. Dozens of people came up and started breaking the windows on police vehicles and smashing furniture towards the cops in defiance.

This, notably, occurred right in The Tenderloin, a notably working class gay neighborhood, exactly where the march and ensuing police crackdown happened last month.

“In many ways, that is why we end our march there,” Storment said. “Now it's become this thing where now there's not only property damage, but there's threat to human life. I even heard in an interview yesterday the police chief said that they were trying to make an example out of us.”

Police pepper sprayed attendees as they violently arrested them. Storment spoke to Trans News Network while traveling to an arraignment hearing for them. They referred to the police’s actions as “completely inappropriate and tone deaf,” emphasizing that this event was “supposed to be a celebration. There were kids, there were families there.”

Fortunately, the Trans March safety team was able to deescalate the situation before police attacked more people.

“We really bring everyone to fight for trans liberation as a collective struggle, and none of us are free until all of them,” they noted.

In terms of long-term solutions, Storment is working on negotiating with the city’s mayor to minimize the amount of police that are brought to the event. They plan to continue SF Trans March’s work, organizing throughout the year to politically educate the populace, empower artists, and to get people involved in organizing on days like the Trans Day of Remembrance and Trans Day of Visibility.

“Being organized is paramount, so Trans March isn’t just an organization that’s a one-day event,” they said, later adding that, “I do really want to drive home that we’re gonna gather no matter what, and nobody’s gonna stop us from doing that.”

Trans March gets most of its cash from other community organizations sponsoring them, and they rely heavily on donations. When asked how people can help them in their work, Storment mentioned that donations can aid with paying for food and event costs. They provided the organization’s donation link, and also asked for people in the area to chime in with volunteering.

“Another way is just getting involved in terms of interacting with our social media, joining our political organizing meeting or volunteering. I think in many ways that's more if not as valuable to get involved. We really just appreciate the opportunity for anyone anywhere to get involved with collective liberation.”

Minneapolis People’s Pride As A Blueprint

The author and her girlfriend, Pattie, at People’s Pride last year.

Here in Minneapolis, we have a similar event that’s become widely beloved by the local queer community. Known as Minneapolis People’s Pride, the event emerged as a protest of Twin Cities Pride, an event notorious for collaborating with police and featuring countless corporate sponsors, actively driving out the radical elements that makes Pride worth celebrating.

I’ve written previously about my experiences at People’s Pride with my girlfriend last year. This year was even better than last – countless radical organizers putting up booths, even more trans people than I’ve ever seen. Plenty of music, dancing, amazing outfits on people, even some local food trucks this year set up shop. I got to meet new people, hang out with close friends, and just unapologetically be myself.

It was everything I could hope for in this sort of event. I loved it.

Nevertheless, I will note that next year I desire to see more improved COVID safe accessibility and better maps to help new folk. To that end, I may just reach out to try and volunteer, something they emphasize anyone can and ought to do if they want to see a change. They’re just regular people in the community trying to make something that works for everyone.

It’s a genuinely freeing experience, and I wanted to talk a bit about why locals have taken to People’s Pride over the better financed yet corporate slog of Twin Cities Pride, also known as Loring Park Pride. To that end, I spoke with some folk – both those that I personally know well, and those that I don’t – about their experiences with People’s Pride and why it resonated so much with them.

I should also note that Minneapolis People’s Pride themselves, as an organization, declined to comment for this piece.

“I've been to People's Pride for three years in a row now. This was my third year attending. The first time I attended was in 2024, when I had just moved back to the Twin Cities after going to college on the East Coast,” Autumn Nelson, a Twin Cities-based musician and organizer, said. “It was sort of a reintroduction to the in-person physical uh queer community in the Twin Cities. I actually attended People's Pride that summer of 2024 before I fully moved into my apartment in Minneapolis, and it had just filled me with so much hope as a chronically ill transgender woman, being able to find this community of people, many of whom were masked and many of whom were openly trans, waving trans flags.”

Nelson emphasized the difference between the organizing scenes that she was familiar with in Boston and in the Twin Cities. In Boston, she described it as dominated by cisgender gay people, something which alienated her. In comparison, People’s Pride affirmed to her that she “made the right choice to move back to the Twin Cities.”

“I went again in 2025 and had a great time. This year, 2026, was really the year that I think made the biggest impact on me. Just the gravity of everything that happened with anti-trans legislation,with the murders by ICE in the Twin Cities, and just the variety of heightened expanses of fascism that have been crushing people…,” she said, with a pause. “To have this space, the entirety of Powderhorn Park, feel a place where my body was truly accepted, my body and my personhood, and that I was surrounded by people who not only valued queerness but valued it enough to create a politically queer statement by providing an alternative to the Loring Park Pride was incredibly meaningful to me and just a good refresher of the hope I have for the city.”

Nelson noted that Loring Park Pride often comes across as performative, with a strong emphasis on commercialization over liberation. This is especially true, she notes, with the presence of politicians, political parties, and corporations across the event.

“It makes me feel like more of a product than a queer transgender woman.”

In contrast, the benefit of People’s Pride comes through the broader sense of community that’s given. There is a strong sense of actual pride. The goal is not to make money nor is it to push a political brand, it's simply a celebration for queer people to hangout with each other and feel proud of who they are.

In giving advice to people who may desire to build something similar in other parts of the country, Nelson emphasized the need for intersectionality.

“Consult transgender woman. A recurring problem in a lot of organizing spaces is that transmisogyny becomes prevalent, and people use trans women as a political pawn to advance their ‘LGBTQ+ movements’ rather than including us in discussions themselves,” she said. “A lot of us are organizers, a lot of us want to help. And I would say especially centertrans women of color, particularly Black and Indigenous trans women.”

She noted that People’s Pride requires at least 60 percent of all vendors – who are always individual queer artists – to be Black and Indigenous. She cites this as a major reason for its success.

“I think really trying to decenter whiteness and decenter those systems of oppression, it is at the root of what makes the event good.”

Kylie Minarik, a trans woman living in the Twin Cities, had a similar perspective.

“This year was actually the first year that I have attended. Before that I went to the regular corporate pride in Minneapolis. I had heard that they expanded the event grounds and there's more people that came this year, which is nice!,” Minarik told Trans News Network. “It's hard to explain [how it impacted me] because it's just.. being around that many people and that many queer people and especially trans people,was very profound for me in a way that is so simple but also so important.”

“Just being around people who would actually want to sit at the dinner table with you, to have a meal and go to an event with you... That's what was great about it for me, because I'm just so used to pride being this corporate thing and seeing that it doesn't have to be like that was really empowering.”

Minarik notes that she felt alienated from the first year she went. While there, she saw a large photo op experience with Target – the corporate giant that, in recent years, has rolled back its support of queer rights by cutting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and getting rid of pro-queer merchandise. They have similarly embraced anti-Black racism by excluding Black artists and employing these same tactics to racist ends Speaking strictly anecdotally, the rare bit of queer merchandise I have seen in different Target stores has at best been a single corner selling a handful of shirts and stickers. I’ve further not seen any bit of merchandise targeting folk who are proud to be Black.

“There's just something in the soul that happens to me when I see something like that. I immediately think, ‘okay, are you here because you want to support queer people or are you here because you want a space for people to see the Target logo?’”

She further notes that the presence of other brands has similarly felt alienating, although she did note that the parade was the one enjoyable part of the Loring Park event, albeit even then a mixed bag due to the heavy corporate presence.

“I remember one year I went, I think it was the same year, there were booths of credit unions. I know there's home insurance companies uh who have their logos with the pride colors. But you know the moment July 1 comes around that they're getting rid of that,” she emphasized.

On the flip side, she said that People’s Pride offered her a chance to be in tune with her actual community, being able to support individual artists, see her neighbors, and chat with local radical organizations that are making a meaningful difference locally.

In essence, it was like the benefits of Loring Park Pride without any of the corporations or politicians.

“I had to tell all my trans friends and I was like, ‘y'all would not believe like how there's.. it's just an energy you feel. It's a presence. It's like wow, especially for Minneapolis, it's as a trans woman, just when I was around people when I was at People's Pride… just being there around that energy was just incredible,” Minarik said. “ I hope more cities can replicate that and have a space where people actually feel comfortable to be around my community. I know that I don't feel comfortable when I'm trying to be around my community and I keep seeing these corporations that clearly don't care about me.”

Given the current attacks on trans communities, she found this particularly powerful.

“The world is, especially the United States right now, really awful from a government standpoint, but when we have community, it's like there are people here. There are so many people here in Minneapolis that will support me and will support my goals and I need to do the same thing for my community”

Minarik went on to offer some advice for people who want to emulate People’s Pride’s model.

“Do not work with the police. Make it grassroots. Make sure you have people, make sure you have vendors and organizations. [Make sure you]have a good vetting process of who's going to have a booth and what organizations and what vendors are able to set up there. Make sure that they actually give back to the local community,” she noted. “If you're going to do music, similar sort of deal, just have local music acts that are vetted and queer… [also] keep the mayor out.”

How Other Cities Can Go Forward

Pride was a riot. While corporate and police-backed events may want people to forget this, it will remain true whether they like it or not. Queerness and transness are not something the social order likes, and the degree of censorship and compliance with blatant bigotry is nothing short of heinous. Defiance — messy, uncivil, relentless, and at times violent — is the reason we’re still alive today.

No amount of lobbying for more do-nothing politicians nor appeasing well-off nonprofit careerists will give us liberation. Following their method got us to this very situation – where police are once again free to terrorize, assault, and arrest people just for being queer and trans.

We need to remember our history. We need to remember the role we can play for each other.

If politicians and Gay Inc were going to save us, they would’ve done so by now, or perhaps even prevented the very backslide into fascism we’re experiencing. Instead they’re still excusing it, looking for which of the rest of us they can give away to secure their own crumbling spot in the elite.

There is no external force coming to liberate us from queerphobia. The only solution we have, the only one that has ever worked, the only one that has given us liberation, is to fight. Without apology, without regret and — for those who want us dead — without mercy.

I spoke earlier this year with a trans activist in Mexico City, Razzia Santillán, who herself has faced countless bouts of victimization from her government, and yet nevertheless still manages to break ground in her home. She offered Americans a bit of a guide for what we need to do: draw from our own history, and draw from those growing up on the streets, particularly those made homeless by queerphobia who survived through community.

This queer street culture saw a major decline following the AIDS genocides in the 80’s and 90’s, with numerous activists from this very background unfortunately dying before their time because medical systems neglected them. This is in spite of the fact that these very activists are the ones who pressured the government to develop treatments for AIDS and HIV, ultimately saving thousands of lives across the globe.

But it doesn’t have to remain obscure. Our history may be buried, but it is not forgotten. It is rich and diverse, drawing from people of all perspectives from walks of life that have been trudged on by the powers that be, and it’s one that allows us to live our lives today.

If we want to keep living and keep fighting, we can’t just leave it at occasional events like Pride, or specific days like Trans Day of Remembrance. We need to organize further, and go beyond just one-off celebrations to continuous fights for ourselves, each other, and our communities.

People like those behind Trans United Front, Minneapolis People’s Pride, and the San Francisco Trans March offer us some blueprints for what we can continue doing to help each other not just live, but to thrive. They show us the need for an intersectional movement, one that expands beyond quick events, that rejects corporations and police, and spans the country to reach the working class queer and trans people who are the vast majority, and the heart, of our communities.

If we want to see change and to protect each other, we need to start in our cities and communities, where we live. Many people are realizing this independently – imagine just how much stronger we’ll be if we start organizing on these lines deliberately, and together.

Pride was a riot. Pride can still be a riot. If we’re going to survive, it has to be.

-Edited by David Forbes

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