Happy Pride!

How will your firm celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride Month in June?

The history of the struggle for LGBTQ+ liberation is interwoven with the practice of law, and the greatest moments of progress throughout the past century have come as a result of advocacy both within and outside the legal system. Take a moment to revisit:

• The 1924 founding of the United States’ first chartered organization dedicated to gay rights by WWI army veteran Henry Gerber, whose home in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood is now a national landmark.
• The civil disobedience by members of the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights group, who years before the Stonewall riots organized “sip-ins,” demanding service at New York bars that refused to serve gay men.
• The historic turning point of the Stonewall Riots, which made the rights struggle visible across the country and is honored each year in June with the celebration of Pride Month.
• The passage in 2000 of the country’s first state law protecting the rights of same-sex couples to marry, in Vermont. Many other states would follow, and in 2015 the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges declared same-sex marriage a constitutional right.

The work to ensure equality is never done, and institutions continue to evolve — or be forced by legal action to change — in large and small ways. One small way to do your part as a communications professional is to pay careful attention to the language your firm uses to describe identity in internal and external communications. This Human Rights Campaign glossary of terms is a good place to start.