Stonewall Lessons
Jeff Graham, Executive Director, Georgia Equality
Georgia Equality is a partner of Georgia Engaged, the state’s America Votes affiliate.
While various LGBTQ communities in the United States and around the globe celebrate with Pride celebrations throughout the year, June holds a special place in LGBTQ history because of an important milestone: The Stonewall Riots. This year is especially poignant because it marks 50 years since the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a bar catering to some of the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ community in New York’s Greenwich Village, stood up to the police harassment and unjust imprisonment that defined much of the gay and transgender experience throughout most of the twentieth century. Over the next few nights gay residents of Greenwich Village erupted into more protests, and within weeks, Village residents quickly organized into activist groups to concentrate efforts on establishing places for gays and lesbians to be open about their sexual orientation without fear of being arrested.
While these were not the first protests of these raids, nor were they the first time that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people had organized around issues of equality and justice, they did strike a chord that rippled across the country and eventually around the world. In June of 1970, people organized in cities throughout America, including my hometown of Atlanta, to commemorate the riots and continue to fight for fairness regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity.
I was four years old at the time of the Stonewall Riots, but the legacy of those events has shaped my own personal and professional life. Growing up in a union family in the 1970s made me keenly aware of the power of people coming together to help each other. However, we were also working-class “townies” living in a college town. I learned firsthand about the challenges of bridging the divide between the lofty idealism of youth and academia and the fact that most people are simply fighting to keep their families housed and safe. Within my own family, calls for the liberation of women and LGBT people were heard as threats. Yes, we supported families different from our own when the union went on strike, but there was no sense of solidarity between us and the activists calling for greater social change.
But there was something about those experiences that helped me see the connections between people and the struggle for justice as I got older. My first advocacy campaign was the fight to have the administration of my small liberal arts college officially recognize our LGBT student group. Later, like so many others of my generation, I cut my activist teeth on the street activism and civil disobedience of ACT UP. Success in both of those efforts depended upon the ability to not simply motivate and mobilize a base, but to expand that base by connecting our issues with the issues that most resonated with people whose experiences were different than us. For my fellow students, it was about the basic right to organize with like-minded peers without administrative censorship. For the AIDS movement, it was dispelling the myth that HIV was a judgement from God by focusing on the science and breadth of humanity affected by this disease.
But there was something about those experiences that helped me see the connections between people and the struggle for justice as I got older.
Today I’ve replaced the Silence=Death t-shirt, leather jacket and whistle with a suit, tie and lobbyist badge, but what hasn’t changed is the challenge of connecting my priorities and agenda to the daily struggles of those outside of my own community. Sometimes that is talking about how my family experiences love, loss and fear for the future just as theirs does. Other times it is pointing out that economic security, immigration status and personal safety affect LGBTQ individuals in the same ways they affect other communities. It is reminding people that in addition to being children, coworkers and neighbors, we are also people of faith, union members and veterans.
What hasn’t changed is the challenge of connecting my priorities and agenda to the daily struggles of those outside of my own community.
Too many people felt that winning marriage equality was the end of the rainbow for LGBT America. However, over the past few years we have come to realize that little has been won when the rights of transgender individuals to access housing and health care are being jeopardized, when children in foster care are denied access to a loving home because of someone’s religious bias and when a woman’s basic right to control over her own body is being erased for political gain.
We need to remember the lessons from the Stonewall Riots. What hurts one of us hurts all of us. We need to work hard to not only connect our movements together, but to expand beyond our usual base of support. We need to learn from non-binary people that we do not live in a society that is either red or blue. We can change the course of history through our resistance, but only when we bring others into our struggle.
