"When you walk the streets walk with your head held high. Even a stranger knows if your walking brave enough with pride."

A day to go and everyone is excited to go to the Pride. Or should I say at least me and the gang are excited. It had long been planned that I will take my friends to celebrate the night. Last year rained so hard and I still went. And from here and then, the question is individually why do we celebrate gay hood? (if there is such a term)

To many the answer would be to be accepted by society. To many still, it’s to uphold gay rights. Over the years, people go through the struggle of finding a place to belong to whether straight or not. More than rights and long term achievements, to me this is a celebration of individuality. I bet everyone struggled in some ways. Looking over the years that passed, I thought we all are lucky to be surviving the unfair world. Above all, thankful, that we are given options to decide what we want to do in life.

Below is an article on how the pride started.

Early on the morning of 29 June 1969, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning persons rioted following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn—a gay bar that was heavily patronized by people of colour, including a high percentage of drag queens — in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. The Stonewall riots are generally considered to be the beginning of the modern gay rights movement, as it was the first time in modern history that a significant body of LGBT people resisted arrest. Given the population that frequented the establishment, a large percentage of the people who initially fought back were persons of colour.

On 28 June 1970, the one-year anniversary of the riots, the Gay Liberation Front organized a march, coordinated by Connor Weir, from Greenwich Village to Central Park in New York City in commemoration of the Stonewall riots. On the same weekend gay activist groups on the West Coast of the United States held a march in Los Angeles and a march and 'Gay-in' in San Francisco.

The first marches were both serious and fun, and served to inspire the widening activist movement; they were repeated in the following years, and more and more annual marches started up in other cities throughout the world. In New York and Atlanta the marches were called Gay Liberation Marches, and the day of celebration was called "Gay Liberation Day"; in San Francisco and Los Angeles they became known as 'Gay Freedom Marches' and the day was called "Gay Freedom Day". As more towns and cities began holding their own celebrations, these names spread.

In the 1980s there was a cultural shift in the gay movement. Activists of a less radical nature began taking over the march committees in different cities, and they dropped "Gay Liberation" and "Gay Freedom" from the names, replacing them with "Gay Pride".

History says it all but individually we also make history for ourselves. From the word itself GAY PRIDE, I think that more than a celebration of history, it means celebrating the character that makes us proud of ourselves. Respect for example. We earn it if we wear it. When you walk the streets walk with your head held high. Even a stranger knows if your walking brave enough with pride.