Every June, we commemorate both Pride and Juneteenth, and while the parties grow louder, the truth seems to grow quieter. Between corporate floats and rainbow drinks, there is a silence that threatens to swallow the memories of those who never lived to see this season of supposed freedom. This month cannot only be a celebration; it must also be a reckoning.
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Don’t feel like celebrating Pride with Trump in office? That’s exactly why we have to this year.
They’re fighting a war against identities that will exist until the day that the human race fades from this universe.
Juneteenth marks the delayed emancipation of enslaved Black people in Texas. Pride marks the defiance of queer and transgender people, many of them Black and Brown, who risked everything at Stonewall and beyond. Yet the intersections of these legacies — Black queer and transgender people born into bondage or left behind in systems of incarceration, disease, and neglect — remain overlooked.
We must say the name Frances Thompson. She was a Black transgender woman born into slavery. After surviving the Memphis Massacre of 1866, she testified before Congress about being gang-raped by white men. The decision to testify was a brave act that made her one of the first known anti-rape activists in U.S. history. Historian Channing Joseph called Thompson’s testimony “one of the linchpins in getting the political will together to pass legislation to protect the civil rights of newly emancipated Black people and also to bring political will behind Reconstruction after the Civil War.”
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Ten years after the massacre, she was arrested for “cross-dressing” and publicly outed in newspapers. She died shortly after her release from prison. Her story is not folklore; it is fact. She was not an exception. She was a harbinger.
This June, we must also mourn those whose names we may never know: Black queer and trans people who died of AIDS during the peak of the crisis in the 1980s and early 1990s — what many call “The Plague Years” — but who were too poor, too isolated, or too ashamed to ever be named in the obituaries. They were artists, lovers, comrades, and caretakers. They were buried in silence, while white gay men were often memorialized, their stories enduring.
We remember Black queer and transgender people behind bars, forced to navigate criminalization, abuse, and solitary confinement for simply existing. We remember those cast out by their families, excluded by white-led LGBTQ+ organizations, or lost to systemic neglect.
This Juneteenth, in the midst of Pride Month, we must carve space not just for celebration but for grief. We need a space for tears, for memory, for rage, for the many Black queer and trans people we’ve lost this year alone. From police violence, healthcare neglect, transphobic murder, and untreated trauma, the toll is ongoing. Every name we chant is one of many. Every life lost is a mandate.
Let this be the month we rededicate ourselves to Black queer and transgender liberation — not as a footnote to other struggles, not as a subsection of Pride, not as a single hashtag — but as its own urgent and ancestral mandate.
Because before rainbow capitalism, before viral visibility, and long before anyone declared liberation, there were Black queer and trans people fighting to be free.
Some were named. Most were not. All must be remembered.
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