Pride parades, sponsorships, and celebrations all trace their roots back to Black and Brown trans people, who reached their absolute limit with police violence, surveillance, and harassment. We gave this movement its heartbeat. But decades later, our communities are still being asked to work for free in the name of a liberation that has not yet fully reached us. We are told we should be grateful for visibility, but visibility does not pay the rent or keep us safe. The reality is that 34% of transgender people are living in poverty, making visibility without economic investment insufficient.
Our labor has always sustained this movement. The fight for LGBTQ+ rights has long been carried by people who placed their bodies, safety, housing, income, and lives on the line. Yet today, the communities who made Pride possible are still the ones asked to volunteer their labor while institutions, festivals, and corporations benefit from our culture.
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The Marsha P. Johnson Institute (MPJI) refuses to repeat this pattern. Black and Brown trans labor is sacred labor, especially for our own cause. If we ask local Black and Brown trans people to bring their time, relationships, knowledge, credibility, creativity, and lived experience to our work, then we should pay them. Compensation is not separate from our mission. When transgender people continue to experience an 18% unemployment rate, investing in Black and Brown trans leadership is essential to the future of this movement. Unity means we pour into each other. Fair payment is one way we practice this.
This year, as MPJI traveled across the country during Pride, we launched Pride Corps. It is not a volunteer staffing program; it is a model for redistribution, political education, community memory, and paid Black and Brown trans leadership.
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Through Pride Corps, we created paid opportunities in every city we entered. Pride Corps members became local ambassadors, educators, fundraisers, storytellers, and bridges between MPJI and the communities we visited.
These members introduced people to MPJI and our Pay It campaign, sold merchandise, raised funds, gathered community information, connected with local organizations, shared resources, documented the tour, and invited people into honest conversations about Black and Brown Trans liberation. Most importantly, they brought the knowledge of their own communities. They knew the culture, the language, the organizations, the local leaders, and the realities people were facing. You cannot fly that knowledge into a city. It already lives there, and it deserves to be recognized and compensated as expertise.
Pride Corps also gave our consultants an experience many Black and Brown trans people are rarely promised: the opportunity to travel, meet our elders, witness younger people discovering their history, and experience Pride with a group of people who understood them.
For people from communities that are not always allowed to imagine growing old, seeing our elders standing in the sun – alive, glowing, reading our banners, and recognizing the history we were carrying – felt magical. It was the kind of experience that stays with you for a lifetime.
We watched elders light up when they read our banners about the price of Pride and the honest, painful, sometimes ugly history beneath the celebration. We also met people who had never heard of Marsha P. Johnson or Stonewall.
There we were, standing at the crossroads between Pride today and the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Around us was music, celebration, vendors, chosen family, elders, and young people attending their first Pride. Beneath all of it was a history born from resistance to policing and the refusal to accept one more night of mistreatment. The experience reminded our team that carrying this history is work. Teaching it is work. Creating a safe and joyful space for people to encounter it is work. The Black and Brown trans people doing that work deserve more than gratitude. They deserve investment.
That investment has never been more urgent. Across the country, we are watching companies quietly scale back their commitments to Pride, pull away from partnerships, and retreat from the very communities they once celebrated. At the same time, opportunities are shrinking for Black and Brown trans people to be compensated for sharing our stories, organizing our communities, and carrying this movement forward. Pride cannot become another space where our communities are expected to give more while receiving less. If we truly believe Black and Brown trans lives matter, then our budgets, our partnerships, and our priorities should reflect that.
To be sure, there are many people who volunteer countless hours every Pride season simply because they believe in the movement. Their commitment is invaluable, and volunteerism will always have a place in community organizing. But we should not confuse generosity with obligation. When Black and Brown trans people are consistently expected to contribute their expertise, relationships, leadership, and lived experience without compensation, we reinforce the very inequities Pride was created to confront.
Pride was not given to us, and we must not act as if it were. It was won through resistance by people exhausted by policing, brutality, exclusion, and erasure. Many of the people who made our present possible did not receive safety, wealth, recognition, or the opportunity to grow old. Now we stand inside celebrations they helped make possible. Who could have imagined Pride becoming what it is today? Perhaps Marsha could.
Our responsibility is to ensure that the people whose lives and resistance created Pride are not forgotten within it. That means teaching the history without shaming those who never learned it. It means creating joy without hiding its price. It means paying our people. It means moving resources. It means choosing unity in community.
Pride has always had a price. It should not continue to be paid only by Black and Brown trans people. Now we are asking everyone who inherited this movement to help sustain it.
Pay It.
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