Proud at Mozilla

While Mozilla has participated in various Pride celebrations in the past, this year our LGBTQIA+ staff (aka our Pridezilla community) considered how to honor Pride, and the consensus was clear: avoid anything that could even be perceived as pinkwashing. Because we are committed to an internet that promotes civil discourse, human dignity, and individual expression, we didn’t want Pride to be about promoting ourselves. Instead, we focused on connecting with (and celebrating) one another across Mozilla.

We started by turning digital tools we use to communicate daily into fun expressions of Pride. Emojis are a powerful means of human expression, and we came up with these Firefox forks for our Slack channels.

Firefox-themed Pride emojis

And we also had a number of custom Zoom backgrounds for use throughout June

Pride-themed Zoom backgrounds

We curated a series of learning engagements. including daily links pointing to notable figures in the Pride movement, a resource page (featuring films, podcasts, books, and more), and recommended supportive actions we can all take.

We warmed things up with a movie night, starting with This American Wife  and later in the month, Pariah.  Then we hosted a Virtual Pride Parade in our Hubs meetup space. The following week, we held a pronoun training session to learn about the importance of effective and respectful pronoun use, emerging pronouns and related terminology. These sessions were not only well attended, but importantly, they led to real discourse on when and how to ask about pronouns and how to use tools like slack to display our pronouns effectively.

And, in maybe the most intimate activity we had, we held an hour-long panel discussion with members of our Pridezilla community. They shared a lot of laughs, serious and vulnerable talk, and knowledge surrounding their various experiences as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. They also mentioned some learning resources like Lambda Literary, a Hulu show (Please Like Me) and some Instagram pages to follow (e.g. PAPIJUICE, InstaHolla and Poppyseedbrooklyn).

While the month was encouraging, we know the movement requires more than a month. We’re committed to making this learning and connecting to be a larger part of our regular rhythm; for example, we’ll add more pronoun trainings given the interest and learnings from that; and we’ll be formally surfacing more ways to support our LGBTQIA+ community through our upcoming Inclusion Champions program (more on that soon!).