This year the New York City Pride was chosen to be the host of WorldPride, an international organization dedicated to raising public awareness for LGBTQ+ issues through Pride Events. In part, New York City Pride was chosen because this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that occurred in our very own Greenwich Village. To participate in this momentous Pride year, the PRISM Board organized a multi-institutional group to march in New York City Pride on June 30th 2019 under the banner of the national organization Out in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (oSTEM). We hosted approximately 50 LGBTQ+ and allied scientists from several institutions—academic, industrial, nonprofit, educational—who marched in Manhattan south on 5th Avenue through Greenwich Village and then north on 7th Avenue. We were joined by hundreds of other LGBTQ+ organizations, major corporations, politicians, and media figures. Our contingent was one of very few STEM-related groups in the march.
We marched to bring awareness to issues that the LGBTQ+ community continue to face and to openly enjoy a celebration of our many identities. This year was particularly important because it served as a reminder that the first Pride was in fact a riot. A riot in response to the overt homophobic and transphobic laws that allowed the NYPD to raid the Stonewall Inn, at the time, and remains still today, a well-known sanctuary for LGBTQ+ folks. Many believe that the riot was started by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two transgender women of color, when they allegedly threw the “first brick”. Both Marsha and Sylvia are held in high regard as the act of throwing the brick and the subsequent riots are widely known as the birth of the modern-day civil rights movement for LGBTQ+ people.
Marching under the oSTEM banner allowed us to protest the continued lack of equal treatment of LGBTQ+ scientists. Although studies have demonstrated that LGBTQ+ individuals leave STEM majors at a greater rate and that LGBTQ+ scientists report discrimination in the workplace, they are not recognized as an underrepresented group by any major funding agency—a designation that could mitigate some of these disadvantages. Transgender scientists in particular face especially high levels of discrimination and encounter major institutional bureaucratic hurdles while transitioning and even years later.
Our march comprised of people from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, many countries of origin, and a broad spectrum of LGBTQ+ identities. The diversity of this group underscores the diversity we envision for the future of the scientific workforce. We hope that by marching we have inspired others to live authentic, open lives as scientists and to realize they are not alone. We also hoped to raise awareness to the march’s spectators that LGBTQ+ people are an important part of the scientific workforce.