On dKos, someone recently commented to the effect that gays should be embarrassed by Gay Pride parades. I wanted to troll-rate the comment, but held my finger because I think it came from ignorance about what Pride rituals are (historically) about. The urge to trollify was also tempered because recently I had to explain this same history to my parents who--were in their twenties when the Gay rights movement came to life in 1969, are lefties, have a gay son (me!), and yet--knew nothing about the origins and underlying meaning of Gay Pride.
And so, a big gay diary...
Imagine you're a poor, black NYC tranny and it's the summer of 1969. You've been ostracized from your family because you're queer and haven't seen your mother in years, though she lives with your father, brothers and sisters in a decent apartment just up on 117th Street.
You, on the other hand, live where you can--a friend's couch, a generous trick's bed, the streets, a furnished room when you have the cash--and barely scrape together enough extra for food and a rare night out with friends. This is one of those nights--June 27, 1969.
You're set to perform at an underground establishment for "bent" folk down in the Village, just off Christopher Street, for five bucks pay and some free beers. Otherwise, it's tough to find work because as you've heard about a thousand times, either audibly, via mocking laughter, or with judgmental eyes: No one's gonna hire you, faggot. [Or how about, "You're fired, faggot." Which they can still LEGALLY say today in 30 states.]
So you're set to make the five-spot for a song or two and the cops walk in, ten of them. The place turns real quiet. The next thing you know, you and a few of your friends--they usually targeted the effeminate ones for raids like this--are being sequestered at the ends of billy clubs and herded toward a wagon outside, which, as you know from experience, will be headed to the local precinct.
But tonight, something happens. A tipping point occurs. And somewhere between the door of the bar and the doors of the wagon, you notice that people like you are screaming in the streets. A seven-foot tall drag queen just set the trash can at the corner of Bleecker and Christopher on fire. Holy shit! You, your friends, and the cops just stand there, bug-eyed.
And then you start to yell. REALLY LOUD. And the cops suddenly look...scared. And then, chaos. For three days. The Stonewall Riots had ignited, and sparked a revolution. And you were there, sister. Thank you.
Riot veteran and gay rights activist Craig Rodwell says: "A number of incidents were happening simultaneously. There was no one thing that happened or one person, there was just... a flash of group, of mass anger." Raids like the one I described had been occurring for decades in every major city in the US, but on that night people started acting up, questioning discrimination and fighting for their basic rights as citizens of this country.
I took my parents to the current Stonewall Inn for a beer and explained the above, and went on to tell them about our current annual celebration of that uprising and its aftermath, namely, Gay Pride. Mom and dad were thankful for the obscure history lesson and we had a nice night at the Stonewall, some thirty-odd years after the riots (no one hit on my dad, but someone did mistake him for my `daddy'---ick).
One thing that sticks in my head about our conversation was a question they asked: Why is it that we only see coverage of what looks like really `extreme' behavior at these parades? I imagined them sitting at home in Ohio, while images of glittered up muscle queens and dykes on bikes flashed across the screen, and I giggled, perversely, and said something like:
That's exactly what they [the MSM] want you to see--a (beautiful) freak show makes for great ratings. And as an avid participant in a few of these shows, I for one should know! But the real heart of these celebrations is our ongoing struggle for equal rights, our ongoing struggle against shame, and the recognition that we are a community, every last one of us, together. [BTW, usually, my favorite group at the parades is PFLAG.]
I think Michael Warner, Yale professor, summed up Pride best a few years ago in the Village Voice:
Excerpt: "Suddenly the city works by a new set of rules. Look how many queer folks there are! You don't have to seek them through chat rooms, bars, or subtle glances. All you have to do is walk outside. There are all kinds of people. They don't share any kind of identity; they just live in a city that, for a single day, stops presuming the heterosexuality even of people who sleep with another sex. If they share anything, it is a history of disruption, of learning to live through shame, of having to overcome the resistance of the world in order to be here and to build this culture together. Not an identity, but a project for making a new world--an unpredictable world, in which people differ and there's always something new to learn.
Proud of what? Proud of that."
And so am I.