Pride Month: Celebrate Pride!

Lena Waithe is an American screenwriter, producer, and actress. She is the creator of the Showtime drama series, The Chi, and the BET comedy series, Boomerang, and Twenties. She also wrote and produced, Queen & Slim, a feature film. She is also the executive producer of the horror anthology series Them.

Elliot Page is a Canadian actor and producer. He has received several accolades. Page first came to recognition for his role in the television franchise Pit Pony (1997-2000), for which he was nominated for a Young Artist Award, and for his recurring roles in Trailer Park Boys (2002) and ReGenesis (2004).

Jenny Shimizu is known for her modeling work for Banana Republic and for her panelist position on Bravo's Make Me a Supermodel program. This Japanese-American fashion model also had an acting career, appearing in the television series Dante's Cove.

Bayard Rustin was a brilliant strategist, pacifist, and forward-thinking civil rights activist during the 1950s. In 1947 as a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Rustin planned the "Journey of Reconciliation", which would be used as a model for the Freedom Rides of the 1960s (nps.gov). Rustin, a gay civil rights leader, was kept in the shadows by the Civil Rights movement establishment but organized the March on Washington (Henry Louis Gate, Jr. blog post).

Deni Lovato is an American singer, songwriter, and actor. After appearing on the children's television series Barney & Friends, Lovato rose to prominence for their role as Mitchie Torres in the musical television film Camp Rock and its sequel Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam

George Takei is an American actor, author, and activist. He is best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise in the television series Star Trek. He also portrayed the character in six Star Trek feature films and one episode of Star Trek: Voyager.

Pauli Murray - As a civil rights activist, feminist and attorney, Pauli Murray influenced Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Alongside Betty Friedan, Murray was a founder of the National Organization of Women (NOW), and she wrote extensively about the importance of women’s equality under the law.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg stood on the shoulders of a woman who came before her: Pauli Murray, the African American valedictorian of her class at Howard Law School, whose ideas not only laid the groundwork for the arguments that Thurgood Marshall and others would ultimately use to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson’s separate but equal doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education but also were directly used by Ginsburg “to convince the Supreme Court that the Equal Protection Clause applies to women.” (BU Today)

Alan Turing was a war hero, a giant of computer science, and a gay man who simply wanted to be able to live freely. History should remember Turing as the innovative mathematician and codebreaker who played a pivotal role in ending the Second World War and laid the foundations for personal computing and artificial intelligence.

Attorney Susan Allen, a Rosebud Sioux Tribe member, became the first openly lesbian Native American elected to a state legislature in 2012 when she won a special election for a seat representing District 61B in the Minnesota State House. “[Native Americans] are such a small minority... We are still here. We still have a political existence. We have this place in the state and that needs to be recognized.” – Susan Allen (via star-tribune)

BD Wong made his Broadway debut in "M. Butterfly." He is the only actor to be honored with the Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Clarence Derwent Award, and Theater World Award for the same performance. He starred in the television series All-American Girl (1994) and has made guest appearances on Sesame Street.

Margaret Cho is an American stand-up comedian, actress, singer, songwriter, fashion designer, and author, best known for her stand-up comedy routines and stand-up tours across the United States, through which she spoke of political problems regarding sexuality and race, specifically LGBTQ+ community and Asian-Americans. She is also known for creating the ABC sitcom All-American Girl.

RuPaul Andre Charles is an American actor, model, singer, songwriter, television personality, and author. Since 2009, he has produced and hosted the reality competition series RuPaul's Drag Race, for which he received two Primetime Emmy Awards in 2016 and 2017. RuPaul is the most commercially successful drag queen of all time.

Shamim Sarif is an openly gay author and a multi-Award-Winning Director for Feature Films and TV, who is a British-born Indian Muslim. Much of her work features LBGTQ storylines, such as I Can’t Think Straight and The World Unseen. Both books have been produced as feature films.

Laverne Cox is an actress and LGBTQ+ advocate. She rose to prominence with her role as Sophia Burset on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, becoming the first transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in any acting category, and the first to be nominated for an Emmy Award since composer Angela Morley in 1990.

James Baldwin, the Struggle for Black Liberation Was a Struggle for Democracy... (Blair McClendon). James Baldwin, an American essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the United States and, later, through much of western Europe.

An internationally recognized activist and artist, the Black feminist, lesbian, poet, mother, warrior Audre Lorde was a native New Yorker and daughter of immigrants. Both her activism and her published work speak to the importance of the struggle for liberation among oppressed peoples and of organizing in coalition across differences of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, age, and ability.

Harvey Milk was a visionary civil and human rights leader who became one of the first openly gay elected officials in the US when he won a seat on the SF Board of Supervisors in 1977. Milk’s unprecedented loud and unapologetic proclamation of his authenticity as an openly gay candidate for public office, and his subsequent election gave hope to LGBT people.

Rachel Anne Maddow is an American television news program host and liberal political commentator. Maddow hosts The Rachel Maddow Show, a nightly television show on MSNBC, and serves as the cable network's special event co-anchor alongside Brian Williams.

Hailed as being one of the longest-serving and most fearless activists in the lesbian community, Barbara Gittings founded the New York chapter of The Daughters of Bilitis, picketed the White House in the ‘60s, and counseled gay people who were discriminated against by the government.

Mattee Jim, a Navajo trans woman and is of the Zuni People Clan and born for the Towering House People Clan. This is how she identifies as a Diné — the word that those in the Navajo nation use among themselves. Navajo voters like Mattee were instrumental in flipping Arizona, a battleground state, blue. “From what I’ve learned growing up, the elders would tell us that we’re special people,” Mattee recalled. “A family was blessed to have someone in their family who was LGBTQ. The riches were the knowledge they knew, the roles they played, the tasks they do.”

Diyingo ‘Adaanitsíískéés (We Are Sacred)

Alicia Garza - Community organizer, activist, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi started with social media after a not guilty verdict of Trayvon Martin's murder and prompted a cultural reckoning.