A message to a younger generation of the LBGTQ community on the 43rd anniversary of Stonewall

[markpkessinger]

Gay Pride weekend is always such a fun time to be in New York -- there is the parade, of course, and the Pier dance, plus any one of the various club and private parties that will start tonight and last well into Monday morning. But I've noticed a disturbing trend in recent years, in which certain elements of the LGBTQ community express their discomfort with some of the more, shall we say, overt and expressive elements within our community. The complaints seem to grow a little louder each year. Such complaints, I believe, are not only unhelpful, but they actually serve to play into the hands of the very forces that have long sought to repress us. And they are based, I believe, on a serious deficit in the knowledge of our community's history.The complaints usually go along the lines of, "If only there weren't so many (select one or more: drag queens|overtly sexual displays|topless "Dykes on Bikes", etc.), and if only people were more, well "normal," our community would be able to achieve full equality much sooner." They go on to claim that these more "outrageous" elements are the thing that holds the community back from full inclusion and equality. It's a tempting myth. It's always easier to focus on those who are different as being the source of our problems. But it is a complete fabrication that betrays a genuine ignorance of the history of repression of the LGBTQ community.

First, that approach (i.e., assimilation, being as "straight-acting" as possible, not drawing any attention to oneself) has already been tried. It was a colossal failure. In the 1950s and '60s, there were only a couple of organizations who were willing to brave the harassment of police and the FBI. The predominant activist organization was The Mattachine Society. The whole philosophy of The Mattachine Society was based on the idea that if only LGBTQ people could convince heterosexual society that we were "just like them," "straight" society would recognize just how irrational its prejudice had been, and repression would naturally cease. It didn't work. If anything, repression of the LGBTQ community increased during those years. The 1960s in New York were a time of random police raids of gay and lesbian bars and meeting places. People arrested in such raids were subject to having their names published in the newspapers as having been arrested on "morals" charges. As a result, people lost jobs, were shunned by families, and even lost their housing (as it was legal for a landlord to eject them on the basis of such arrests).

Second, the Mattachine theory rested on a totally false prior assumption; to wit, that bigotry and prejudice are, in the first instance, rationally based. Unfortunately, what the good folks of The Mattachine Society didn't quite grasp was that bigotry NEVER requires a rational basis (although bigots will be more than happy to adopt any rationale they can get away with in order to legitimize their bigotry).

The tide didn't begin to turn for the LGBTQ community until that hot, June night in 1969, when the NYPD set out on one of its usual raids, this one directed at the Stonewall Bar. Here's the thing about the crowd that frequented Stonewall in those days: with some possible exceptions, they were NOT the buff, scrubbed types with their Ivy League MBAs, lucrative jobs on Wall Street and summer shares in Provincetown or Fire Island Pines. No -- those types had far too much to lose to be caught in such an establishment. The Stonewall crowd was, rather, a rag-tag bunch of drag queens, street kids, trannies, hairdressers, struggling actors, kids who turned tricks on the street to survive, and the like. And it was this group -- not the modern, scrubbed and pressed, oh-so-normal gay man of today -- that finally had the courage to take a stand against the NYPD's oppression, resisting (sometimes violently) for three days. It was the birth of the modern gay rights struggle.

So the next time you find yourself squirming a bit at someone who strikes you as just a little too effeminate, too overt, too extravagant, or "too gay," remember who it was that had the courage to take a stand on your behalf all those years ago. Remember the folks whose efforts so long ago afforded you the luxury of being "normal." And remember that your rights sink, or swim, with theirs.

[DonCoquixote]

1. I mean this not to offend any Afro-Americans

so please keep in mind I am NOT trying to say an afro american should act one way or another. Nobody is a monolith.

But, take a look at Barack Obama. Barack Obama does not act like the "stereotypical" Black person, he was raised by the "white" side of the family, and it shows in his speech.

Yet, even though, to use the VP's words, Obama tries to project a "clean cut" image, the bigots act like he is some nightmare. They will not even admit he was born IN America. I certainly do not need to go into the outright virulent racist things they do and say.

The moral, the majority will NOT care how much you try to accommodate them, they gain strength from having enemies to hit. The only thing that MAY delay them is if you have money, and even so, they will look for the slightest hole in your armor to attack you and return that money into what they consider the rightful hands, theirs. Note how many poor that turned rich, only became poor again, because a mob of lawyers, journalists and other status quo soldiers attacked them to the cheer of mobs! A minority's only hope is a unified front, period.