In conjunction with World Pride 2025, the Rainbow History Project is creating an exhibit on the evolution of Pride. In “Dawn of a New Era of Pride Politics,” we discuss how fewer than a dozen picketers in the 1960s grew the political power to celebrate openness, address police brutality, and rally hundreds of thousands to demand federal action.

By the mid-1980s, the LGBTQ community’s political demands and influence had grown. The AIDS crisis took center stage across the nation and locally. Pride events morphed from the entertainment of the 1970s into speeches, rallies, and protests. Groups like ACT UP, Inner City Aids Network, and GLAA made protests and public pressure year-round events, not just Gay Pride Day. Blacklight, which was the first national Black gay periodical, ran an in-depth cover story on AIDS and its impact on the community in 1983:

“The gay community has to think in terms of what it can do to reduce the incidence of AIDS,” a writer noted in the Q&A section of the article. He added, “If your partner has AIDS that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t show care and concern, and just throw him out… There should be support groups that would help gay people who have AIDS and not just shun them.”

Just about 10 years later, however, support extended to activism, the onus not just on gay people to reduce the incidence of AIDS. On Oct. 11, 1992, ACT UP protesters threw the ashes of their loved ones onto the White House lawn to protest government inaction and negligence.

“If you won’t come to the funeral, we’ll bring the funeral to you,” one protester said about President Bush, according to the National Park Service. 

The Ashes Action and many other protests brought awareness to the issues of the day – the epidemic, government ignorance, and police brutality, among others.

When the first High Heel Race began on Halloween 1986 at JR.’s Bar and Grill, a popular 17th Street gay bar, about 25 drag queens ran up 17th Street, N.W., in their high heels from JR.’s to the upstairs bar at Annie’s Paramount Steakhouse, where they then took a shot and ran back to JR.’s. It was joyous and grew in popularity yearly despite impacting the locals’ “peace, order, and quiet,” according to the Washington Blade in 1991.

In 1990, though, pushback from the neighborhood community against the High Heel Race meant its official cancellation in 1991 – no coordinators, no queens, and no planning. However, despite statements that it wouldn’t occur, people still came. Roughly 100 police officers arrived to break up the crowd for causing a public disturbance. They injured people with nightsticks and arrested four gay men. D.C. residents Drew Banks and Dan Reichard planned to file brutality charges, and lesbian activist Yayo Grassi had her video camera, recording the scene.

“This will set back a lot of the good will between the Gay community and the police,” said Tracy Conaty, former co-chair of the Gay Men and Lesbian Women Against Violence, in a 1991 interview with the Blade. “What people will see and remember now is that police used excessive force on a group of peaceful crowd because of their homophobia.” 

Other protests advocated for equal representation. D.C.’s 1948 sodomy law was first repealed by the City Council in 1981 – but Congress overturned the repeal. Still, gay activists urged the D.C. Council to consider action. 

“Here in the district, we have been thwarted by a bunch of nutty fundamentalists from other places, and so the whole population of Washington remain habitual, recidivist, repetitive, villains, held hostage by a small group of noisy fascists,” Frank Kameny said at a 1992 rally. A successful repeal of the law passed subsequently in 1993, and this time, Congress did not interfere.

Our WorldPride 2025 exhibit, “Pickets, Protests, and Parades: The History of Gay Pride in Washington,” centers the voices of the event organizers and includes the critics of Pride and the intersection of Pride and other movements for equal rights and liberation. But we need your help to do that: we are looking for images and input, so take a look around your attic and get involved.

Vincent Slatt volunteers as director of archiving at the Rainbow History Project. Walker Dalton is a member of RHP. See rainbowhistory.org to get involved. 

Although few Americans heard about it at the time, LGBTQ+ Africans remember that Kamala Harris stood up for them when she visited Africa as vice president in March 2023.  

On March 27, 2023, she appeared at a joint news conference in Accra, Ghana, with Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo. The final question came from Zolan Kanno-Youngs of the New York Times. Referring to the bill that would impose harsh jail terms on LGBTQ+ people, then being considered by the Ghanaian parliament, and citing the Biden administration’s commitment to” calling out any foreign government that advanced anti-gay legislation or violates human rights,” he asked her “what have you said to the president and plan to say to other leaders on this trip about the crackdown on human rights?”

Under the “Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill,” which was passed by the Ghanaian parliament on Feb. 28, 2024, people who engage in same-sex relations will be subject to up to three years imprisonment, anyone who promotes LGBTQ+ rights can be jailed for six to 10 years, and all LGBTQ+ organizations will be banned. The act is now being challenged in the country’s Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

As Nii-Quarterlai Quartner, professor at Pepperdine University, writes in his new book, “Kamala, the Motherland, and Me,” “even before he completed his inquiry, members of the Ghanaian cabinet made their disapproval apparent. You could see their faces get tight and hear the whispers. You could even hear some laughter. Was it nervous laughter? Was it belittling laughter? Was it somewhere in between? I don’t know. But the immediate shift in energy was palpable. Despite the angry stares and even some snickers from around the room, Vice President Harris never paused or hesitated in her response.”

Standing at Akufo-Addo’s side, Harris answered the question directly and at length. 

“I’ll start,” she said, “I have raised this issue, and let me be clear about where we stand. First of all, for the American press who are here, you know that a great deal of work in my career has been to address human rights issues, equality issues across the board, including as it relates to the LGBTQ+ community. And I feel very strongly about the importance of supporting freedom and supporting and fighting for equality among all people, and that all people be treated equally. I will also say that this is an issue that we consider, and I consider to be a human rights issue, and that will not change.”

Former President Donald Trump’s policy, if he wins the election this coming November, would be quite different.  

According to the Project 2025 report, prepared under the direction of the Heritage Foundation by leading Trump advisors, in Trump’s second term, the United States will “stop promoting policies birthed in the American culture wars” and stop pressing African governments to respect the rule of law, human rights/LGBT+ rights, political and civil rights, democracy, and women’s rights, especially abortion rights. “African nations are particularly (and reasonably) non-receptive to the US social policies such as abortion and pro-LGBT initiatives being imposed on them,” by the United States, the report declares. Therefore, “the United States should focus on core security, economic, and human rights engagement with African partners and reject the promotion of divisive policies that hurt the deepening of shared goals between the US and its African partners.”

The fate of LGBTQ+ Africans may not matter much to most American voters, but the results of the US election matter to them. Their safety, freedom, and lives depend on it.

Daniel Volman is the director of the African Security Research Project in Washington, D.C., and a specialist on US national security policy toward Africa and African security issues.

Ukrainian men are being pulled away from vital humanitarian work and drafted into the military under new conscription laws, according to local activists.

One huge challenge facing Ukraine’s war effort is a shortage of conscripts. Kyiv hopes new laws passed in April 2024 aimed at recruiting many more soldiers will help it get on the front foot militarily, particularly after a fresh wave of attacks from Russia in May 2024 in the northeast.

Vasyl Malikov is the Kharkiv coordinator of Alliance.Global northeastern Ukraine. The NGO provides a wide range of services to the LGBTQ community in the Kharkiv region, including HIV prevention and testing, psychosocial help, medical, and humanitarian aid.

He told me that most of the men who work with the organization to provide these services as well as their volunteers are liable to be called up for military service under the new conscription drive.

Russian invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 have resulted in a protracted war being fought along a front line stretching over several hundred miles. In August 2024 Ukraine opened a new line of attack when it pushed into Russia’s Kursk region, with reports estimating Ukraine could commit as many as 10,000 troops to the attack. Despite the widespread use of new technology on the battlefield, much of the war is being fought by more traditional means, with large numbers of soldiers armed with rifles defending the country from trenches.

The new laws aim to reinforce Ukraine’s tiring military and lower the age of conscription from 27 to 25, although volunteers over 18 are still accepted.

Ukraine has for a decade been successfully pressing the United States government and leaders in Europe for weapons to defend itself against Russian aggression, but having enough soldiers to use them is a significant challenge.

An initial target of conscripting 450,000 to 500,000 new recruits has been lowered, but it is not clear what the new number is. I’ve been regularly reporting from the front line in and around Kharkiv, the country’s second biggest city, over the last two years, and it’s obvious that Ukraine’s military is running short of personnel.

Malikov says some of the men who work with Alliance.Global have already been called into the army, and are hard to replace. “Good international practice is that many of the services we provide to LGBTQ people are best done by social workers and volunteers who come from the communities they serve (peer-to-peer),” he said. 

“We do an enormous amount of work providing vital social and other support to gay men and bisexual men in and around Kharkiv. Trust is important in the outreach to these communities, and if men from our team are taken for the army you can’t just get anyone to replace them. These are experienced professionals, committed to this work.”

A few of the Alliance.Global team are exempt from the military draft on medical grounds, or for some other reason. Malikov is himself currently exempt because he is also a university professor, but this academic certificate has to be renewed every three months – a long bureaucratic process, he says, which can involve him queueing for five hours at a time. 

This new challenge comes as the country’s LGBTQ community confronts a halt to progress on legislation to introduce same-sex civil partnerships, despite more than 70 percent of Ukrainians polled saying that LGBTQ people should have the same rights as other citizens. This is a huge improvement from 2010 attitudes, when only 28 percent of Ukrainians thought that “gay men and lesbians should be free to live their lives as they wish.”

Yet, as Bogdan Globa, president and co-founder of QUA – LGBTQ Ukrainians in America, notes, “thousands of LGBTQI+ are serving in the army with a civilian partner back at home. For straight couples, if something happens with a military partner (wounded or killed), a civilian partner will obtain a variety of government benefits, from cash support to housing. In the case of same-sex couples, they are invisible to the government and have no help or recognition. A civilian person has no right to even bury their partner’s body.” 

Malikov says, “any Ukrainian man could find himself in the military in a matter of weeks from now, because it’s a civic duty of Ukrainian men during wartime, including any number of the 80 or more men who are part of the Alliance.Global network.” 

The new recruitment drive presents new tests for his work in Kharkiv. “It makes things very difficult to plan. We don’t know who will be called up, or when, and it’s another layer of unpredictability to an already uncertain future,” he says.

For more, see Human Rights First’s new report, “New Recruits: Ukraine’s Military Conscription Laws Threaten Humanitarian Efforts,” written by Maya Fernandez-Powell and myself.

Brian Dooley is senior adviser for Human Rights First.