Alliance Note: The Alliance community is happy to celebrate Pride month with all of you. We are committed to fighting for the rights for all people in recovery, including those of us with diverse sexual and gender identities. We are forever grateful for the enormous wealth of culture and art that has come from our LGBTQIA+ community members. We are grateful for the opportunity to explore new ways of relating to love, community, bodies, family, gender, and sexuality. And we are grateful for the many LGBTQIA+ people who have been at the forefront of the civil rights movement, the disability rights movement, the feminist movement, and the consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement.
The Alliance will be sharing many ways for you to celebrate and honor the many contributions of our LGBTQIA+ community members throughout June. Keep an eye out for additional information and see below to read a message from NYS Office for People with Developmental Disabilities Commissioner, Kerri E. Neifeld.
June is Pride Month
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
It’s June and the start of summer, which means so many things to all of us – vacations, visits to new places, outdoor fun, cookouts, baseball games, and more.
June is also Pride Month, a time for us to celebrate and honor our freedom to be ourselves and the beautiful diversity within our human experience. Each year, Pride Month helps us remember that we all should celebrate ourselves proudly as we come together to recognize and support members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Pride Month grew out of efforts to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City, six days of protest that took place after the New York City Police Department had raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan known as a haven for the LGBTQIA+ community. Today, what started as a single march in New York on the first anniversary of the riots has spread to include Pride celebrations in cities and towns worldwide.
Pride Month 2024 will be marked by celebratory activities and events across New York State. Highlights will include the NYC Pride March, the illumination of Niagara Falls in Pride colors, Pride Night with the Syracuse Mets and festivals, parades and more taking place from the Adirondacks to Buffalo, to Long Island and places in between. Each Pride event will bring people from all walks of life ─ places big and small, urban and rural, and young and old ─ together to show love for each other and celebrate the many contributions made by the LGBTQIA+ community to history, society and cultures across the world.
I am proud and excited that OPWDD staff and self-advocates will be walking in several marches this year, showing our pride in the LGBTQIA+ community within our state and among New Yorkers with developmental disabilities. As we do, I invite you to check out the organization PrideAbility to learn how you too can support LGBTQIA+ advocacy for people with developmental disabilities throughout our state. Lastly, I hope you will look for an event near you where you too can share the Pride month message of love, acceptance and inclusion. What better way to start the Summer!
Sincerely, Kerri E. Neifeld, Commissioner