In the early hours of the morning of 28 June 1969, queer patrons and supporters of the Stonewall Inn in New York began a series of spontaneous protests in response to violent police raids of the establishment and the wider anti-gay sentiment characterising the US at the time.

These riots were a watershed moment, embodying and giving momentum to collective queer resistance against a discriminatory and cis-heteronormative American legal system, and exclusionary social practices. Within a matter of weeks, new organisations were founded in order to bring together what was increasingly referred to as the “gay liberation movement”, and protests for equality were mobilised across the US and beyond.

As a consequence of this pivotal moment, widespread global celebrations and protests are carried out each year in June in honour of International Pride Month. While “Pride”, as it is now known, is a global phenomenon, the meaning and nature of these events are not universal. They are inflected with questions about country-specific challenges and contestation with queer movements about the purpose of Pride: should it be more celebratory or more political?

Stonewall was decidedly political. It foregrounded key intersectional questions in relation to personhood, belonging and legitimate citizenry. American queer activists such as Marsha P Johnson, an African-American transgender woman, and Sylvia Rivera, an American transgender woman of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent, for example, highlighted the unique oppressions that they, and other trans Americans of colour, faced at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, race and sexuality. This provided a more complex lens through which to understand the difficulties and triumphs experienced by LGBTQIA+ people.

Of course, the Stonewall riots were not ends in and of themselves – America’s journey towards legislative and social equality for queer people has been long and arduous, and progress has been slow, with the Supreme Court having legalised same-sex marriage only as recently as 2015. Arguably, Pride celebrations in the US  and around the globe have greater urgency today than ever before.

South Africa’s own historical and contemporary struggle for queer equality is punctuated by an occurrence in 1966, three years before Stonewall. South African police forces raided a party in Forest Town in Johannesburg, arresting nine men for “masquerading as women” and engaging in “indecent activities”. And in 1969, South Africa’s apartheid government amended the 1957 Immorality Act to include the “men at a party” clause, which aimed to prohibit two or more men from performing any act that would arouse “sexual passion”. It is clear that queer South Africans, then and even today, are seen as corrupting influences in broader cis-heteronormative society, in line with wider global trends.

Against this backdrop of societal prejudice, South Africa has its own unique Pride story. While many South Africans celebrate International Pride Month in June, our local Pride Month occurs annually in the month of October: this serves to mark the anniversary of South Africa’s very first Pride event, which took place in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, on 13 October 1990, to support anti-apartheid resistance and the ongoing fight for queer visibility and equality. Archival evidence of our first Pride event attests to its heady mix of protest and celebration, with queer people from a range of different backgrounds demanding respect and equal treatment with a decidedly unapologetic and feverish energy.

Thirty-two years later, South African Pride offers us a moment of reflection, and an opportunity to orientate ourselves in relation to our current struggles and triumphs. In 2022, our work is not done: our forerunners achieved equality and freedom in the Constitutional realm, but many of us continue to experience hardships related to our queer identities. Black lesbian women and trans people, in particular, continue to foreground how belonging in South Africa is inflected with issues related to race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, (dis)ability and their plural intersections.

These intersections were aptly articulated by black queer rights and anti-apartheid activist Simon Nkoli, who proclaimed at the first Joburg Pride: “I am black and I am gay. I cannot separate the two parts of me into secondary or primary struggles. In South Africa, I am oppressed because I am a black man and I am oppressed because I am a gay man.”

In South Africa, as we commemorate both local and international Pride, we should support diverse and indigenous Pride movements, and continue to decentre the prevailing power configurations (re)produced by white cis-heteropatriarchy. In October this year, let us commemorate all Pride, in all its forms. We should allow for complexities and ambivalences within queer communities to be expressed and reflected: there is no one true story of ‘Pride’. But it is clear that while there is much to celebrate, the politics and protest of Pride are needed more than ever.