LGBTQ Pride: From Origins to Evolution Teach-Out

Pride is many different things. It’s both an event and an emotion; it’s a celebration and a protest. Above all, it’s a highly personal experience. 

When creating this Teach-Out, we heard contributors use words like “community,” “family,” and “connection” when talking about Pride. Others described it using words like “exclusion,” “capitalist,” and “erasure.” As one person remarked, “Pride - it’s in a state of confusion,” while another wondered: “Pride: for whom?”

To capture this range of personal experiences, we began to explore the question: in one word, what does Pride mean to you?

We posed this question to our guest contributors, the staff of the Spectrum Center, and participants at Pride Outside, an event hosted at the University of Michigan in fall 2019. Now we’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions to this question as well.  

Please take a moment and fill out the survey to tell us what Pride means to you in one word. Your answers will show up with the words that we’ve collected so far; words that appear more often will be bigger than words that show up only once or twice. 

Together, we can think more deeply about the many different meanings and experiences of Pride.