Screw Parades, Let’s Start a Queer Uprising
We’ve got to do more than day-drink in our rainbow attire
Taking a cue from the major success of the recent women’s marches, the LGBTQ community has begun planning a march of its own to coincide with Washington, D.C. Pride this summer. If you read my recent piece on biphobia among lesbians and gays, you probably aren’t surprised that I have … concerns.
We don’t need another pride march. We need a queer uprising.
David Bruinooge, a 42-year-old gay man from New York, began promoting the march through a Facebook event initially called “Gays on the Mall,” but changed the name to “National Pride March” to be more inclusive. Capital Pride leaders, who organize D.C.’s annual Pride festival, have indicated their plans to collaborate with Bruinooge’s event.
“I was watching the events unfold on T.V. and I was very proud and inspired by all the women, the strong women in our country who were kind of taking this to the street and getting their voices heard,” Bruinooge told Washington Blade. “And in the back of my mind as an openly gay man I thought the gay community should be doing something like this to follow up on the momentum.”
I applaud Bruinooge’s initiative and spirit of resistance against the fascist and repressive policies of the current administration. But if we’re going to do this whole protesting thing, let’s make it more than a celebration of our identities — and definitely more than day-drinking in our rainbow attire.
Let’s make it a celebration of the entire LGBTQ community, in all of our beautiful diversity. Let’s reject the respectability politics and cisheteronormativity and dispense with the whitewashed histories of the movement that got us here.
Let’s embrace the numerous intersecting social justice causes that affect members of our community and stand in true solidarity with all marginalized groups.
And let’s push aside the voices that have dominated the conversation for too long — the mainstream LGBTQ leadership, which is really mostly white cisgender lesbian and gay leadership, if we’re being honest — the ones with the deep pockets and political connections who continue to neglect issues such as …
Poverty, intimate partner violence, systemic racism, immigration and detention, health disparities, police harassment, sexual assault, homelessness, trauma, criminalization, sex work, prison reform, family rejection, sexual health, HIV and AIDS, mental illness, suicide — and so many others.
The LGBTQ movement’s recent history has shown us that when leaders fail to center the voices of the communities for whom they claim to be fighting, we set ourselves up for failure. The failed 2015 fight to preserve the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, is a perfect example of this short-sightedness.
“It’s a dangerous myth that Houston was unexpected,” trans, queer and bi+ organizer Hayden Mora wrote in The Advocate following HERO’s defeat.
“National leadership of the LGBTQ movement has known or had very good reasons to suspect that our opponents — still reeling from their defeat around same-sex marriage — would seize on trans issues to energize their supporters, refill their treasuries, and create a new opportunity to gain traction with voters and the public at large.
“But our funding has been so focused on marriage equality that we were left fighting for the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance without the proper resources for political strategy, organizing and effective, wide-scale public education.”
Mora is describing the failure of major LGBTQ organizations to successfully pivot following the SCOTUS marriage equality ruling to the pressing concerns facing the most marginalized groups within the community, the transgender community in particular.
Instead, groups such as Human Rights Campaign threw their resources into passing the Equality Act, an omnibus nondiscrimination bill that while sweeping in scope, was and still is unlikely to pass in Congress.
“The reaction to the loss itself is telling,” Mora, who now serves as board co-chair of Trans United, a national advocacy nonprofit led by and centered on the needs of the most diverse and marginalized members of the transgender community — who are paid a living wage with trans-inclusive benefits — continued.
“Many whose engagement is bounded by the victory of marriage equality and the goal of passing the Equality Act are left shocked. On the other extreme, for those who spend most of their lives working on the ‘margins’ of our community — the undocumented, the young, people of color, trans folks and those that hold multiple marginalized identities — Houston is like a distant rainstorm amid an ongoing level-five hurricane of profound and pervasive violence and oppression.”
With the ascendency of Donald Trump, the hurricane has grown — or at least more people are feeling its winds — and if we want to survive it, perhaps looking to those who have been engaging at this level for decades isn’t such a crazy idea.
Turning the idea of a proposed “National Pride March” into something more queer, more radical, more intersectional, more rooted in principles of economic justice and restorative justice and more reflective of the incredible diversity of the LGBTQ community than our current movement leadership is a great place to start.
And what a better way to celebrate Pride than by returning to its radical queer roots? If this is to be a protest in the tradition of the Stonewall Riots and the Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day Parade that started the modern pride movement, we should celebrate those who began the fight.
A quick history lesson. Contrary to popular depictions, a pretty white cis gay kid did not throw the first brick at Stonewall. The Stonewall Riots began when working-class and poor bar patrons, mostly drag queens, youth and transgender women of color — such as Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy — fought back against violence from police.
Brenda Howard and Stephen Donaldson, both bisexual, organized the first Pride march the following year.
Let’s honor their strength and sacrifice by centering the voices of transgender, bisexual, queer, POC, disabled, indigenous, undocumented and nonbinary people.
Those of us who are cisgender, white, economically privileged and gay or lesbian, need to step back and make space for other leaders, even if we encounter messages and tactics that make us uncomfortable. And most of all, we need need to stop giving lip service to ideas like justice and equality and diversity.
We must actually invest money and resources in organizations and leaders who are already doing this work and centering the most marginalized — and trust that they know better than our privileged asses what is right for their communities.
So instead of a gay pride march this summer, let’s have a radical queer intersectional revolution. Let’s march down the streets of our nation’s capitol celebrating the parts of ourselves and our communities that Trump and his minions hate the most.
Let’s put the brick that started this whole movement back in the hands of the revolutionary queers who had the courage to throw it.
Stay defiant.
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