4th June 2021
Celebrating Pride Month
Pride Month is celebrated every June, commemorating the Stonewall Riots of 1969. Working with Mindshare Collective’s LGBTQ identity group and GroupM’s Pride Alliance ERG, we’ve pulled together resources and events for how we can educate ourselves, grow, celebrate, and take action to support the LGBTQ community—not just today, but year-round because Pride is not just a season.
Some Significant Moments in LGBTQ+ History
1946 - The first LGBT Organization, the Netherlands “Center for Culture” is established.
1969 - The Stonewall Uprising.
1970 -The first Gay Pride parade is founded by bisexual Brenda Howard and they march in New York from Greenwich Village to Central Park.
1977 - Harvey Milk becomes the first openly gay elected official in California.
2015 - Gay marriage is legalized in the U.S.
Pride Month Events
This year, Pride is a mix of virtual and in-person events. Check out some of the events and dates happening across the country.
- LA Pride: Events all month-long, but particularly June 11-13
Some of the Mindshare and GroupM Events
- June 3: PFLAG Gender Pronoun Workshop: a virtual workshop around gender identity and pronouns, and sharing how to be an ally to folks with gender-expansive identities. Note: for those who couldn't make the session, PFLAG provided more resources here and here.
-- June 3 and every Thursday afternoon (not just this month): GroupM’s Pride Alliance is holding a RuPaul’s Drag Race Kiki/Happy Hour to chat the latest and greatest (and not so greatest) performances of the show.
-- June 30: Pandora and GroupM present Loud & Proud: Lifting LGBTQ+ Voices in Music & Podcasts. Hear from music artists, executives, and podcast creators as they share their road to pride and their continued fight for better equality and representation.
To Listen: A Selection of LGTBQ Podcasts from Oprah Daily (which has a list of 15)
Getting Curious
Host: Jonathan Van Ness
“JVN is inquisitive about a lot of things: cults, Lizzo, bees, the war in Yemen, the Romanovs, cash bail, artificial intelligence, the Beyoncé of renaissance painting, Brazil, menstrual cups, and figure skating, to name a few. Every week, the lusciously bearded Queer Eye guru sits down with a different specialist (from historians to surgeons and musicians) to spill tea and get answers to burning questions.”
Queery
Host: Cameron Esposito
“The stand-up comedian and actor conducts hour-long, heartfelt conversations with diverse members of the LGBTQ community: Abby Wambach, SOAK, Our Lady J, and Bob the Drag Queen, just to name a few. Esposito doesn't shy away from wading into a guest's darker times—but she also uses warmth and wit to shine a light on queer folks' successes as well as their struggles.”
Las Culturistas
Hosts: Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
“Do not eat or drink during this pop culture-obsessed show, because you will cackle-laugh. Saturday Night Live cast member Yang and Haute Dog host Rogers talk TV and pop music, tell their "readers" about awkward run-ins during celeb interviews, and share stories from their friendship dating back to when they met at NYU. Don't miss each ep's "I Don’t Think So Honey" segment, in which the hosts and their guests get one minute to talk about anything they loathe: going to bed without taking makeup off; Forrest Gump; restaurants that don't allow dogs; and actual honey.”
To Watch: A Selection of Shows and Movies from Autostraddle (longer list on the site)
Dancing Queens, on Netflix: “Dylan Peterson’s got a job cleaning the drag club Queens where their star choreographer, Victor, spots her dancing and realizes WOW SHE’S A TALENT! She could save the Queens! Except she’s a girl. So she pretends to be a boy so she can be a drag queen?”
LFG, on HBO: “A “no-holds-barred” inside account of the U.S. women’s national team’s ongoing fight for equal pay, as told by Megan Rapinoe, Jessica McDonald, Kelley O’Hara and others.”
Love, Victor (season 2), on Hulu: “Victor Salzar came out as gay to his family in the Season One finale of Love, Victor — the Hulu teen romcom spin-off series of the original Love, Simon — and now that he’s out, the whole series gets gayer as Victor builds a larger network of queer friends and tries to figure out what being gay really means to him.”
Revolution Rent, on HBO: “Neil Patrick Harris, Andy Señor Jr., and Victor Patrick Alvarez bring this documentary about Señor Jr’s experience traveling to Cuba and directing a production of Rent, the country’s first Broadway musical by an American company in over 50 years, which involved reimagining the show in a Cuban context.”
Milk, on Peacock: “Allison Pill plays lesbian activist Anne Kronenberg in this excellent Harvey Milk biopic.”
Comic Books from “8 Comic Books in Honor of Pride”
Stone Fruit: Bron and Ray are struggling as a couple. A bright spot in their life is their 6-year-old niece Nessie. But even that relationship is fraught because of tensions between Ray and her sister (Nessie’s mother), and Bron’s emotional struggles with her own family. This graphic novel, Lee Lai’s first, is bittersweet and filled with authentic dialogue and realistic situations, including a lack of tidy resolutions. You can’t help but root for the characters, even if they are perhaps better off spending time apart. Fantagraphics. Available now.
Wynd Book One: Flight of the Prince: In Pipetown, a world where magic is seen as corrupting, Wynd, a young boy, must hide his true nature. This is proving difficult as he ages and his pointy ears can no longer be concealed. Wynd longs for a normal life and to befriend Thorn, the kindly son of a groundskeeper. “Maybe I could ask him his name; maybe we could have a life together,” he wishes in a vulnerable moment. A harrowing adventure awaits as the writer James Tynion IV and the artist Michael Dialynas pit Wynd against the Bandaged Man, an enforcer of Pipetown’s king who hates magical beings. Boom! Studios. Available now.
Alice in Leatherland: Meet Alice, a writer of children’s books with a huge heart … that is absolutely crushed when she discovers her girlfriend is cheating. The crisis inspires her to seek a new life, and perhaps a new love, in San Francisco. This romantic comedy, written by Iolanda Zanfardino and Elisa Romboli, who are a couple, is most assuredly for adults: The story depicts — sometimes with little left to the imagination — the ups and downs of casual sex. One conceit of the five-issue story, which wraps up in August, is that each chapter includes scenes of a fairy tale by Alice, about a firefly who is seeking a mate. Black Mask Studios. Available now.
Books
A Night at the Sweet Gum Head: Drag, Drugs, Disco, and Atlanta's Gay Revolution by Marty Padgett (June 1, 2021)
Coursing with a pumped-up beat, gay Atlanta was the South's mecca—a beacon for gays and lesbians growing up in its homophobic towns and cities. There, the Sweet Gum Head was the club for achieving drag stardom. Martin Padgett evokes the fantabulous disco decade by going deep into the lives of two men who shaped and were shaped by this city: John Greenwell, an Alabama runaway who found himself and his avocation performing as the exquisite Rachel Wells; and Bill Smith, who took to the streets and city hall to change antigay laws. Against this optimism for visibility and rights, gay people lived with daily police harassment and drug dealing and murder in their discos and drag clubs. Conducting interviews with many of the major figures and reading through deteriorating gay archives, Padgett expertly re-creates Atlanta from a time when a vibrant, new queer culture of drag and pride came into being. (Source: Google Books)
The Queer Bible by Jack Guinness (Expected on June 8, 2021)
‘We stand on the shoulders of giants. Now we learn their names.’ THE QUEER BIBLE is a collection of essays written by queer icons, about the queer trailblazers throughout history who inspired them. From Elton John on Divine to Graham Norton on Armistead Maupin; Russell Tovey on David Robilliard to Lady Phyll on Moud Goba; Tan France on the Queer Eye cast to Mae Martin on Tim Curry, today’s queer heroes write about the icons that provided a creative inspiration to them. Other contributors include Amelia Abraham, Paula Akpan, Courtney Act, Munroe Bergdorf, Mykki Blanco, Joseph Cassara, David Furnish, Paul Flynn, Paris Lees, Juliet Jacques, Gus Kenworthy, Freddy McConnell, Paul Mendez, Mark Moore, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hanne Gaby Odiele and Matthew Todd. Each essay is accompanied by exclusive, bespoke illustrations by queer or ally artists, to create a truly beautiful celebration of queer culture. Based on the popular website QueerBible.com, founded by model and activist Jack Guinness, this timely collection, edited by him, continues his mission – to create a space dedicated to the celebration of queer history. The Queer Bible is a love letter to the LGBTQI+ community and its allies. (Source: Google Books)