Less than two weeks after the shooting in Orlando that left 49 people dead and 53 injured—with gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Latinx people numbering disproportionately amongst the casualties—Chicago’s still-mourning LGBTQ community will kick off Pride Weekend festivities Saturday with the 20th annual Dyke March.
Although once seen as a slur, many lesbians have reclaimed the word “dyke” and now embrace it as a positive term when used by members of their own communities.
“We don’t want to be colonizers who just go into the neighborhood and disrupt everything,” says Alexis Martinez, a transgender woman who has been a member of the Dyke March Collective, the group that organizes the event, for six years. “We’ve built some good relationships; we have some foundational roots in the neighborhood.”
“We try to minimize the police presence simply because we feel that, as people of color, police are not looking out for our best interest,” says Martinez. “We haven’t had any problem at any Dyke Marches that we haven’t been able to handle on our own, and the police generally have been very cooperative.”
