Pride Edition: If You Could Have Dinner With Anyone, Where Would You Go?

We have marched in the rain. We have danced in the streets. We have celebrated in cities where the flags hung from every balcony and in places where flying one still takes courage. Pride, for us, has never been just a party. It has always felt like something we were walking into, something earned and ongoing and, depending on where you are standing, still very much unfinished.

So this month, same question as before: If you could have dinner with anyone, alive or dead, who would it be, and where would you go? Here are a few of ours.

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, New York City, USA

The place: The Stonewall Inn, Greenwich Village. A corner booth. Late night.

Before there was a parade, there was a riot. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, patrons of the Stonewall Inn fought back against a police raid. They had been doing it quietly for years, absorbing the harassment, the arrests, the humiliation. That night, they did not.

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were there. Marsha was a Black transgender woman who had been living on the streets of New York since she was seventeen. Sylvia was Latina, fierce, and unwilling to be erased. Together they founded STAR, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, one of the first organizations in the country to provide housing and support for queer and transgender youth.

But Stonewall was not even the beginning. Three years earlier, in 1966, transgender women of color led an uprising at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, fed up with the same police harassment, the same indignity. It is a story fewer people know. The women who gathered there were not just sharing a table. It was where community happened, quietly and defiantly, before the world was paying attention.

Dinner question: What do you want people to understand about what you were actually fighting for?

Gilbert Baker, The Castro, San Francisco, USA

The place: Twin Peaks Tavern, where the windows face the street and the street has always faced back.

In 1978, Gilbert Baker sewed the first rainbow flag by hand for the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. He dyed the fabric himself. He wanted something that felt like a symbol of life rather than a response to death. He wanted joy to have a flag.

The Castro was, and still is, the neighborhood that holds that history. Walking those blocks, past the painted crosswalks and the murals and Harvey Milk's old camera shop, you feel the weight of everything that was built there and everything that was lost. San Francisco does not let you forget.

Gilbert died in 2017. The flag is everywhere now. He would have something to say about that.

Dinner question: What did you hope people would feel when they saw it?

Harvey Milk, The Castro, San Francisco, USA

The place: The same neighborhood, a different table. Harvey would want somewhere with foot traffic. He liked to watch people.

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected official in California, serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors beginning in 1977. He was assassinated the following year, alongside Mayor George Moscone, by a colleague who opposed nearly everything they stood for.

He had been saying for years that visibility was the whole point. That when gay people came out, to their families, their coworkers, their neighbors, everything would change. He was right. It just took longer than he had.

The Castro remembers him the way cities remember people who shaped them. His name is on the street. His face is on the murals. The camera shop at 575 Castro Street is now a landmark.

Dinner question: Were you surprised by how long it took, or did you always know it would?

Edie Windsor, New York City, USA

The place: A good restaurant in the West Village, the kind with white tablecloths and unhurried service. Thea would have liked it too.

Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer were together for more than forty years before they were legally married in Canada in 2007. When Thea died two years later, the federal government did not recognize their marriage. Edie was taxed more than $360,000 on the estate she inherited, a bill a straight widow would not have owed.

She sued. At eighty-three years old, she sued the United States government.

The Supreme Court ruled in her favor in 2013, striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. It was a decision that made marriage equality possible across the country two years later. All of it flows from one woman who was furious and grieving and decided to do something about it.

Dinner question: What did Thea say to you, in those last years, about what you were building together?

Martina Navratilova, Anywhere with a Court Nearby

The place: Wimbledon, Centre Court, after the last match of the day when the crowds have gone.

Martina Navratilova came out publicly in 1981, at a time when doing so meant losing sponsors, losing endorsements, and losing the comfortable version of a very successful career. She did it anyway.

She won eighteen Grand Slam singles titles. She dominated women's tennis for nearly two decades. She is widely considered one of the greatest athletes in the history of any sport. And for much of that time, she was fighting battles off the court that had nothing to do with tennis.

She has not stopped speaking. On transgender athletes, on sports governance, on fairness, on the complications of a community she has always been part of but not always agreed with. She is not easy. She is not supposed to be.

Dinner question: What does it mean to you to still be in the conversation, all these years later?

Maria Ressa, Manila, Philippines

The place: A long table at the Rappler office, phones off, takeout on the way.

Maria Ressa co-founded Rappler, an independent news outlet in the Philippines that has spent years reporting on authoritarianism, disinformation, and the silencing of dissent. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for that work. She is openly gay. She has been arrested multiple times. She keeps writing.

Her story connects to Pride in a way that feels essential right now. Because visibility is not only about flags and parades. It is about who gets to tell the truth, and whether the world is safe enough for them to do it. In too many places, both answers are still the wrong ones.

From the Philippines to Uganda to Iran, the fight for LGBTQ+ rights is inseparable from the fight for press freedom, for democracy, for the basic right to exist as you are. And then there is Taiwan, which in 2019 became the first place in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, a reminder that progress is not a Western export. It belongs to everyone willing to fight for it.

Dinner question: What do you think truth and pride have in common?

We have marched in Toronto, San Francisco, New York, and in Madrid. We have celebrated in the Eixample in Barcelona, where the rainbow flags line the streets of the neighborhood they simply call the Gayxample. We have walked through Le Marais in Paris, past the bars and the bookshops and the quiet plaques that mark what came before. We have stood in the Castro and felt something that is hard to name and impossible to forget.

Pride started as a riot. It became a march. It became a movement that won marriage equality in country after country, that put transgender lives at the center of a global conversation, that continues to show up in places where showing up still costs something.

The work is not finished. In some places, it is barely beginning.

But the table is worth setting. The people who built it are worth knowing. And the question is still the same: Whose chair would you pull up, and what would you want to ask?

Happy Pride.

________________________________________ Allyship is a verb, not a bumper sticker. Here are some organizations doing the work:

Human Rights Campaign | Equality California | The Trevor Project | Lambda Legal | GLAAD