Laverne Cox Partners with Facebook for New Pride Ads

Actress and trans activist Laverne Cox has partnered with Facebook for a series of new Pride ads. Cox will star alongside members of several LGBTQ Facebook groups to create a new type of Pride advertisement, one that, Facebook says, will feature queer people in more “ordinary moments.”

We all know what the classic Pride advertisement looks like: rainbows everywhere, a joyous celebration, people from all walks of life coming together in the streets to celebrate LOVE! (while blatantly sipping a Pepsi or hopping in and out of Ubers, of course). Facebook’s move to include real people from queer support groups in authentic situations is a pivotal and, frankly, refreshing change to what we’ve grown accustomed to. It’s humanizing, depicting LGBTQ people as people instead of extraordinary caricatures.

Along with a new and improved focus in the advertisements, Facebook is pledging to continue running ads into July. They hope to inspire other companies to take similar actions and continue celebrating the queer community year-round, as opposed to keeping their pro-LGBTQ messages strategically condensed solely into Pride month.

The advertisements will star queer storylines, and the for inspiration, they’ve partner with Facebook groups like “Trans Woman Support Network,” “Qweerty Gamer,” “Black Educated Lesbians,” “LGBTQ Health & Fitness,” “Non-Binary Gender Pride,” and “LGBT Outdoors,” promising both queer and intersectional representation. Many of the groups have less than 10,000 members, forming close-knit, private communities within Facebook where they find support, advice, and family with one another.

As part of her partnership with Facebook for Pride, Laverne Cox also dropped into the Trans Woman Support Network group to speak to members personally. In a video call with the community, Cox shared some of her wellness tips she uses to practice trauma resiliency, including meditation, gratitude, and embodiment exercises. Her exercises focused on finding points of joy in one’s life that can be channeled when trauma resurfaces.

“The important thing about building trauma resilience is that it is embodied,” Cox tearfully tells the group. “When times get hard, when something becomes challenging, I can draw on this [joy], and that can ease some of the distress I’m having in a moment.”

Members of the Trans Woman Support Network were shocked and overjoyed to see Laverne Cox’s impromptu drop-in to their community, and they instantly shared their admiration for the icon who paved the way for trans representation in modern media.

“You give me the strength to be unapologetically trans in my hate community. You are the reason my goals are for the stars themselves,” one member posts. “This commercial is so wonderfully done and joyful,” another adds. “I am so proud of Laverne Cox for her work both behind and in front of the camera lens bringing awareness and understanding to others who are misinformed or truly understand that us in the transgender community are regular, everyday people who just want to live our lives in a happy, healthy, respected way.”