WNBA Launches Groundbreaking Pride Initiative

May 23, 2014 | ELIXHER

Yesterday, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) launched a historic and groundbreaking Pride initiative, WNBA Pride, making it the first professional sports league to initiate an integrated marketing, media, grassroots and social responsibility program.Read More

Brittney Griner Named Phoenix Pride Parade Grand Marshal

February 17, 2014 | ELIXHER

Brittney Griner has been crowned grand marshal of the 2014 Phoenix Pride Parade. Read More

Bed-Stuy Pride: Celebrating Self and Community

March 29, 2011 | ELIXHER 3

For decades, Bedford-Stuyvesant (more commonly known as Bed-Stuy) has been a cultural hub for Brooklyn’s Black population. While White faces trickle into the neighborhood and quaint coffee shops and wine bars pop up along the brownstone-lined blocks, one thing that has always been here and will remain is its Black queer community.

“There’s a misconception in Bed-Stuy that queer folks are gentrifiers, which is completely untrue,” explains Chelsea Johnson-Long, coordinator for a program of the Audre Lorde Project called the Safe OUTside the System Collective (SOS). “There are plenty of queer people who grew up in Bed-Stuy,” she adds. This is one of the many myths SOS, an anti-violence program that operates and serves lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirit, trans and gender non-conforming (LGBTSTGNC) people of color in central-Brooklyn, seeks to dispel with Bed-Stuy Pride.

Bed-Stuy Pride, slated to launch early August, is also an effort to address the harassment that often occurs against LGBTSTGNC people in Bed-Stuy. “Our community members experience a particular kind of violence here,” Johnson-Long explains. “Not just violence because of their sexual identity but also because of their race.”

Often individuals don’t feel safe walking home at night or publicly holding hands with their partner out of the fear of being taunted or physically harmed. This violence is not only from community members, but also from police officers. Transwomen are sometimes stopped and frisked by cops because it is assumed that they’re sex workers. Johnson-Long believes that it is becoming normalized to these every day acts of violence that leads to more heinous hate crimes like murder. “To affect that kind of stuff, you really have to affect the culture of the space,” says the SOS coordinator.

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