In 1969, Marsha P. Johnson showed up on the front lines of the Stonewall uprising with flowers in her hair and nothing left to lose. A Black trans woman who had been told her whole life that her existence was illegal. She didn’t wait for the movement to be ready for her. She was the movement.
And Stonewall wasn’t even the beginning. Cooper Donuts, 1959. Compton Cafeteria, 1966. The Black Cat Tavern, 1967. The front line has always been Black and Brown.
The Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863. Enslaved people in Galveston learned they were free in 1865. Two and a half years of unpaid labor. Two and a half years of violence the law had already forbidden. Two and a half years of children born into bondage that had technically ended. Not everyone lived to learn it was over.
Pride and Juneteenth are not parallel. They are the same story.
Bayard Rustin organized the March on Washington. Lorraine Hansberry wrote about queer desire under initials, because the world could not comprehend her whole name and her whole self at once. Pauli Murray proclaimed that “one person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement,” while the movement kept Murray in its margins. Told to wait. Told to choose. Refusing both. Told to wait. Told to choose. Refusing both.
This is what intersectional feminism actually means: you don’t get to choose which bodies matter. The forces working to undo reproductive freedom, trans existence, voting rights, and Black history are not separate forces. They are one. They have always been one. And they are counting on us to fight each other over the order of operations.
We won’t.
Right now, that force is organized, well-funded, and moving fast. Corporations that flew the flag in 2020 are quietly removing Juneteenth and Pride from their calendars, retiring DEI commitments, and calling it neutrality. It is not neutrality. Silence in the face of erasure is its own declaration. We see it. We name it.
Women’s Foundation California stands with the organizations and movement leaders who refuse to trade one liberation for another. Who know that Black queer joy is not a footnote to feminism. It is the foundation of it.
This Juneteenth.
This Pride month.
We light a candle for every person the state tried to bury.
We speak the names it tried to silence.
We carry the grief that was handed to us, and we carry it together
because this is what love looks like when it is unrelenting.
Because freedom is not given. It is seized, held, passed hand to hand
through every uprising, every march, every refusal to disappear.
The revolution, as it turns out, has always been queer.
Has always been Black.
Has always been women.
Has always been us.