Over the weekend, as part of my Pride Month plans I attended a nearby Equality March for Unity and Pride whose purpose was to mobilize the LGBTQ+ communities, our loved ones, and our allies in the fight to affirm and protect our rights, our safety, and our full humanity. It was to give voice to our concerns, and to support, uplift, and bring attention to those in our communities who are targeted due to immigration status, ethnicity, religion, skin color, gender, and disability.
The organizers also stated that the gathering was to affirm and celebrate that we are a mix of diverse communities, and that a lack of unity has caused many of our needs to be neglected or ignored. They hoped to learn from prior mistakes and come together through common belief in inalienable human rights and dignity for all with a particular focus on those who have been actively silenced and neglected.
However, there was an underlying thread of irony woven throughout the event.
Speaker after speaker got up rousing the crowd to be proud of the progress made within the community since the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969.
They spoke of the scourge of the initial AIDS days and recent attempts to curtail addressing it, the legacy of the Stonewall rebellion, and the years before Marriage Equality.
But the irony was that not one of the speakers was alive back in the days of which they spoke, and if they had been alive, they would have been too young to have been aware of those days in any meaningful way, while in the crowd there were people who were.
There was not one senior member of the GLBT community who spoke and could have brought a personal perspective.
Those who spoke of Stonewall romanticized it giving into the mythologizing of the event, assigning the instigation of the riot to those with whom they identified. While those who were actually there cannot point to any one individual as the person who threw the first rock, or even if a thrown rock or brick had actually started the riot as opposed to any thrown rock being simply part of what was happening much as with the use of the parking meter ripped out of the sidewalk as a battering ram against the bolted shut door of the Stonewall Inn. There is no recollection of the crowd on the street standing waiting for some single sign before beginning acting out their anger toward this one too many bit of oppression.
But the story persists and is modify depending on the speaker or the crowd being addressed.
For a number of years it was claimed that it all began when a young Lesbian threw the first punch at a police officer, but this has now become it having begun with a rock thrown by a Transgender person of Color, and even this wavers between it having been an African American or a Latinx.
All that participants and witnesses can attest to and have is that something got it all going, but what that was is unclear. Each time a new instigator is chosen, the real nameless, anonymous person is further erased from the history as is the spontaneous act of a group
A myth is created to address a need.
Marsha Johnson was one of many Trans people, and the Trans people were one group of the many who were there, and who could just as easily claim the position of instigator. She was prominent because she took the action of pulling people out of the police wagon while the riot was happening, but that does not equal credit for having thrown any rocks.
They credit Stormy for a role that does not jibe with the role witnessed by many participants and eye witnesses. And for most of the first night of the riot, the drag queen given most of the leadership credit was among the first group of people to be arrested and brought to the Station of the 6th Precinct where he spent the night in a cell. Why he was singled for arrest is a much more important story than the myth, but even that history is ignored,
There were many active street kids who were the main players, but speakers at pride events have frozen them in time and ignore they have grown old and in the intervening years they had more work to do and grew old and weary doing it.
There are very few left, so their accounts should be heard before they are gone instead of the story passed on from person to person like that game of Telephone Line where the final person receives a message that is only remotely related to what the first person in line told the second.
They are in the 60s now, heading toward their 70s, and can be so easily overlooked because of their years.
Even Marsha Johnson is frozen into her role at Stonewall with no acknowledgement of what she had done after until her untimely death under suspicious circumstances in 1992.
A true admirer would include that as it is important to who she was and what was done after that weekend in June of 1969.
But myths like to freeze people into one major moment.
Those who spoke on AIDS were children in the first 8 years of the 80s and, although they may be able to recount what they have learned those times were all about to a crowd appreciative of what they are hearing, but there were people in the crowd who were there and had dealt with it who could have told of experiences like being denied medical care, losing jobs and housing, and being denied any visitations once their loved one entered the hospital and were often not told the person had died nor were they allowed at the funeral.
They could have told of the hurt of knowing the person they loved was unnecessarily dying alone, and there would never be that all important final good-bye and that needed final caress.
This, this could have brought home the need to be vigilant of what negative plans politicians have when it comes to AIDS funding for research and support.
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When history was spoken of, the only people spoken of were dead people, people who had died of old age, murder, or the results of having been attacked. Not mentioned, even though they were right there in the crowd, were those who stayed alive and continued to fight and are still fighting.
If the younger people are to really learn they should hear from the senior GLBT people who lived through what these kids do not want to live through, and shouldn’t have to.
They need to know that as much as they bemoan oppression, it had been really worse in the past, and the old guys could tell them that, not from an intellectual historical point of view but an experiential one. They need to learn what it was actually like so that they can be as ready as necessary to prevent a return.
They do not need the surprise of things being worse than what someone who read a book might be able to tell them.
Who knows better than those who actually live it what conditions will be like if the Community does not stay vigilant and the present administration brings back the old days?
While those who spoke at the rally can imagine, those at the rally who went unacknowledged could describe the reality in which they had lived and the effort and sweat it took to change things.
We might compliment someone who loses 100 pounds, but we cannot know what it took for them to lose it if we don’t ask, and don’t allow them the chance to tell us.
There was mention in passing of the repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, but no one spoke who had been affected by it and the time before that flawed compromise. Yet, they were in the crowd.
Understandably the shooting at the Pulse night club, being as it was just a year before this event, and to the majority in attendance it was the worst attack on a GLBT safe place, and to an extent presumably unique because of its being so recent. Meanwhile some on the grass, while not wanting to minimize that horror were very aware of the arson attack on the UpStairs Lounge that took place on June 24, 1973 in New Orleans, where Thirty-two people died as a result of fire or smoke inhalation. The reaction to the Pulse attack ranged from respectful horror to at least one political candidate using it for an attempt to have the GLBT Community throw its support toward his extreme and political Islamophobia. In the case of the UpStairs Lounge the reaction included jokes on talk radio about the patrons, little coverage in the media, no mention of it by the local government, and a weak and easily dismissed investigation on the part of law enforcement..
It happened on an early Gay Pride weekend within four years of the Stonewall Rebellion, and yet people were not cowered, but instead kept up the fight for equality.
There was talk against White Privilege that in itself exhibited a form of discriminatory privilege, as, when naming the various groups of people present at the Stonewall Rebellion there was an obvious omission of the presence of White Gay Males, as if it was important to the cause to leave them out because they were guilty by association, somehow, with those who oppressed the GLBT Community.
And while some speakers decried “Privilege” they described the progress and state of the community within their own narrow experience, listing all the positive changes and what needed to be defended, while seemingly turning a blind eye to the fact that in a large area of the country members of the GLBT Community still face the conditions the old guys sitting on the lawn had experienced even here on the Eat Coast many years ago.
Horrors like that which happened to Matthew Shepherd are well known because they are so out of line with the experiences of the modern GLBT Community in privileged places, while the burning out of a Gay man’s eyes with cigarettes before he was placed alive on a pile of burning tires, a crime that received a very mild punishment in relation to its severity because the defendant claimed that in spite of his picking up the victim in a Gay bar, he panicked when sitting at home and the Gay man came on to him. His defense was, and his punishment hinged on the use of Gay Panic, which allows someone to react with any, even the most extreme degree action, if they feel a Gay man was hitting on them.
Yes, in some places that is still a thing.
I was disturbed by the string of limited knowledge that was passed on as being informed.
The most ignored resource in the GLBT community are the seniors with the lived histories that the younger generation is repeatedly insulated from in the name of romanticized history and mythology.
I was also disturbed that an event that was to address the importance of supporting the marginalized, was marginalizing the Community’s senior members.
People seemed unconscious of the fact that sitting on the lawn in front of the speakers was a resource that was not tapped, but ignored.
It is one thing to pass on history as you heard it, another to pass it on because you lived it.
By the time I left I came to realize I was no longer a part of the Stonewall story and that of the years of battling after because I was a White Gay Man, and I was never mentioned by a speaker, although other groups were included in the litany of members of the community and the only mention of White men was as the privileged oppressor.
I was marginalized because my story and the story of people like me were told to us by those who have heard about them while we were kept silent because, I have to assume, we don’t have famous names, don’t possess the “cute factor”, are assumed to be dead.
This too shall pass.