Opinion: What does Pride month mean to the LGBTQ+ community in 2025?

USA Today

11-06-2025

Opinion: What does Pride month mean to the LGBTQ+ community in 2025? | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on June 9, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: As Pride Month 2025 gets underway across the country (albeit with fewer corporate sponsors), we asked what pride means to you – not just the parades, protests and community, but also your feelings, fears and hopes – and whether it can continue to exist in its current form. Here's what you told us.
Forum is a series from USA TODAY's Opinion team that is dedicated to showcasing views from across the political spectrum on issues that Americans are starkly divided on. If you'd like to weigh in on a different topic, you can find more questions at usatoday.com/forum. And if your submission is selected for print, we might invite you to add your voice to a future special bonus episode like this one. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to [e-mail].
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Michael McCarter:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. LGBTQ+ rights are back in the spotlight as President Donald Trump issues executive orders banning transgender military service members and rescinding funding from educational institutions that allow trans athletes to compete in sports. So far, in 2025, more than 500 bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community have been introduced across America. As Pride Month 2025 gets underway across the country, we asked what Pride means to you, not just the parades, protests, and community, but also your feelings, fears, hopes, and whether it can continue to exist in its current form.
I'm Michael McCarter. I lead the opinion sections of Gannett, the parent company of USA TODAY. This is a bonus episode of The Excerpt highlighting a series from USA TODAY's opinion team called Forum. Here's what readers told us.
Gillian Gurney is 26 and lives in New York. She shared that current events have made Pride more important and that Pride must be seen through the lens of revolution and protest.
Gillian Gurney:
Pride is beyond important though in the current climate we are seeing people try to consistently attack this month in a way that hasn't been seen in several decades. And to me, Pride means so much more than just the joy and courage that we exude as a community year round. But I think this time specifically is a time to acknowledge the revolution that it took to get us here. This is my second Pride being publicly out at age 26, and I think back to people like my grandfather, who is an out gay man, but wasn't able to actually be out until the 1980s when at the same time, the AIDS crisis was rampant throughout his community and he lost several friends to AIDS unknowing as to why, and was treated like a national pariah. So not only is Pride about joy, but Pride is also about honoring those who came before us to make things like this possible.
Trump has never been shy about his direct homophobia, transphobia, and attacks against the queer community amidst at least every other minority community in this country. His hateful rhetoric and quite frankly, unconstitutional directives that he's issued since his first day in office that are purporting baseless attacks on our community that doesn't affect him in any way are deeply concerning. So if corporations, organizations, communities, lawmakers and individuals at every single level of both government and public sector and private sector don't stand up and mobilize and advocate in ways that we need, we could see our country fall back into a time where being yourself could be punishable by law. And we're already starting to see that.
This highlights the responsibility that we have both as queer people and both as allies to stand up and not allow that to happen because the second that we curtail to being silenced, that's when the other side wins. The queer community is both a very diverse community in and of itself, and I think my question would be how can we unite together and not allow other communities to split us up into further factions and band together to make sure that we're able to help everyone?
Michael McCarter:
Sixty-four-year-old David Thibodeau lives in Washington D.C. He's concerned about the threat of violence at Pride events across the country.
David Thibodeau:
I mean, I've worked corporate for a long time and they were strong supporters of Pride and I hate to see corporations and their support for Pride, I hate to see that atrophy. I think it is important. I probably won't be going to Pride this year, even though [inaudible 00:03:55] is holding World Pride. Last year during Pride, there were a lot of warnings from the previous administration about credible terrorist threats to Prides across the country, and this year there have been none, and it gives me pause because I don't think those groups that were issuing the threats last year have stopped issuing threats. I think that this administration is not paying attention to those groups anymore, so it's a matter of safety.
I actually had invited family to come down because it was World Pride this year, and I've kind of uninvited them. I don't want them to be in the middle of anything that might be unsafe. Kind of goes back to when I was a lot younger. Maybe I feel like we've gone 30 years back in time, maybe 40 years. I don't know. I think that anti-LGBTQ voices, their groups are being given a voice and I'm not sure that they represent the greater sentiment of the population. I'm pretty sure that they don't. I think we need to recognize more the root of these events and where they come from and that they are form of protest. There should be more room for a somber recollection of why these events are important.
Michael McCarter:
Houston, Texas native Jazz Paz told us she sees Pride as one way to honor elders in the LGBTQ+ community. She's 73.
Jazz Paz:
I think Pride month is very important and to me it means the celebration of our survivorship. It means that we recognize and are grateful to our elders who made Pride happen. What I'm seeing, especially this year, is big corporations wanting to participate anonymously, which doesn't seem very Pride-ful to me. There are also, of course, the ones that only come out for the Pride events and we never hear or see from them again. That makes me kind of mad. Ones like Target that used to be supportive are now almost like against us, and I think it is a lot of the DEI pushback that we're seeing from this prevailing political environment. I suspect the federal government might continue to honor Pride Month with lip service, but I don't think they're proud of us and I don't think they like us, and I don't think they're going to be enthusiastically endorsing us for the next several years.
I'm a little bit sad that Pride Month has sort of devolved into just partying. There's no sense of, at least in Houston, there didn't seemed to be any recognition of what made all this necessary or possible. It was a political and very serious, it was joyful, but it was taken seriously. In the beginning, in Pride in Houston all the bars closed, all the stores closed. Everybody was in the street watching the parade. There was a band. There was very creative floats. But it was just for our community, nobody else even knew about it. And now there's people with babies in strollers and their grandparents are there, and it's a spectacle. It's no longer, in Houston at least to me, it's no longer an honoring holiday. I think too many of the elders that suffered and really, really worked hard to make this possible have passed on.
I think the more younger generations don't have any idea how hard it was just to survive as a gay person. It was against the law to be gay. It was against the law for women to wear front zipping pants in Houston years ago, maybe like 50 or 60 years ago. And all the people that went to jail and a lot of them committed suicide when they were going to be outed in the newspapers, I don't think young people realize any of that. I think there's a lot of difference between reading about it or hearing about it and knowing the people that separate these things and knowing them personally as your friend.
Michael McCarter:
KJ Novoa is 27 and he's from Douglas, Arizona. He shared that Pride can't be erased even if corporations and politics stand against it.
KJ Novoa:
I think Pride means a lot of things to me, but first and foremost, it means visibility. I think I associate Pride with being out not just in terms of social media or in the media sphere, but also just in the world, being authentic, being ourselves. It's a reminder that we're free to be ourselves in this day and age no matter where the political winds may swing. I do think corporations play some role in Pride, and I do think that could be a positive thing and also to our detriment. Corporations obviously provide a lot of visibility whether we like it or not, and they are sort of a gateway to exposure for whatever cause that we may want to put out there. I think that in the same way, corporations pulling out based on a political direction being inconvenient for them can also be to our detriment, because then that means less visibility for us.
We shouldn't have to depend on corporations or big companies for this type of exposure and visibility for any type of marginalized community, but unfortunately we do. I think within the LGBTQ community, we have to ask ourselves regarding Pride, are we going to hinge so much on corporate support? Are we going to hinge so much on whether a certain president supports us or not? Are we going to hinge so much on public opinion that we let that decide whether we want to be visible or not? Whether we want to be out and about free and showing who we are without embarrassment or without any type of reservation?
I feel like even though I'm only 27 years old, I have learned a lot about LGBTQ history, and I know there's been many cases throughout history where there was times where the politics at the time were even more hostile towards LGBTQ people, whether it was during the Reagan years and when the AIDS crisis started to emerge, or the Lavender Scare when people were afraid of being associated even with certain colors or walking or acting a certain way because they thought it would get them labeled as gay and thrown out of their jobs.
So I think we need to remember that above all, we're resilient, and regardless of whether political winds swing right or left, I think that at the end of the day, we have to remember we're not going to be erased.
Michael McCarter:
That's all we have for today's episode. This is a co-production with the Forum team at USA TODAY, where we invite our readers to weigh in writing on a national topic of interest. If your submission is selected for print, we might invite you to add your voice to a future special bonus episode like this one. There's a link to Forum in the show description. Let us know what you think about this episode by sending an email to [e-mail]. Thanks for listening. I'm Michael McCarter, vice president of the Gannett Opinion Group. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.