Why the LGBTQ Community Is at Odds With Law Enforcement
This comes back to the meaning and origins of Pride as a social movement
In the United States, June is known as Pride Month, thought to honor, recognize and celebrate the lives and social impact and self-accommodation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer people. For the United States, which has decriminalized same-sex intercourse since 2003 and legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, this holiday is officially an important observance in the government, symbolizing the progress and development of society and the diversity of America. Almost every year, cities across America become a sea of rainbow colors for the Pride Month parade. For the millions of people celebrating in the streets, the holiday means not only their hard-earned path to equality but also not forgetting what has been done throughout history and what is threatening them today to achieve that equality.
One might rightly assume that the Pride Parade should be inclusive of all groups and all people as a backlash against the marginalization of the LGBTQ community. However, Pride Parade organizers, they are unlikely to accept police officers as a member of their community. In 2021, two weeks before the start of Pride Month, the leadership of the New York Pride Parade announced that uniformed police officers could no longer participate in the Pride Parade. As police officers have marched in the parade as a common practice since 1996, this move drew the ire of many police officers and the censure of New York’s mayor.
Nonetheless, the leadership did not budge, saying in a sternly worded statement that the law enforcement officers are supposed to provide security, but they instead can pose a threat to those in our communities who are often subjected to excessive force for no reason, sometimes dangerously so. At a time when Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and transgender members face significant threats from law enforcement, police agencies need to “acknowledge their harm and correct the way forward.” They also asked the NYPD to maintain a one-block distance from the parade’s edge and would hire private security to protect the parade.
Predictably, such a clear and assertive attitude meant that conflict between the two sides was inevitable. At a time when Pride as a social force is increasingly being absorbed and encompassed by the mainstream of capitalist politics in the United States, such resistance has led many to begin to realize anew that the LGBTQ community has not really reached complete equality just because of the legalization of same-sex marriage and the normalization of Pride parades, but is still routinely confronted with different types of threats and violence.
As fate would have it, at the 2021 Pride Parade, NYPD officers armed to the teeth in riot gear broke into the parade crowd in violation of previously agreed-upon protocols, causing a small upheaval; eventually several arrests were made and many Pride attendees were beaten.
For the LGBTQ community in New York and across the United States, it is no surprise that law enforcement would choose to act in this way. Their choice of June as Pride Month, as well as their loud and aggressive promotion of their identity, was the result of the brutal and violent tactics used by New York City police officers to start their awakening on a single day in June 1969.
Throughout the 20th century, police infiltration and attacks on all non-heterosexual community spaces and businesses across the country were commonplace. The 1948 Kinsey Report, a study of intersexuality by biologist Alfred Kinsey, had clearly stated that approximately 10% of the population belonged to the homosexual or bisexual community, and 46% of interviewees once had a homosexual arousal, far more than the public imagined. However, by the 1960s, homosexuality was still clinically classified as a mental disorder. To limit their basic rights, most U.S. cities had discriminatory laws that made same-sex relationships illegal, and it was not uncommon to lose families and jobs because of their open sexual orientation.
Cities with large LGBTQ populations, such as New York, had venues that became the few places that allow them to be open about their sexual orientation. One of the most common platforms is mob-controlled bars, as these organized crime groups see the business opportunities that can be gained by catering to otherwise rejected customers. To avoid police raids, these organizations often bribe the police.
Such an operating model is clearly unstable, and many LGBTQ people struggle to find acceptance through these not-so-legal means under immense social pressure, but they still become targets of heavy-handed law enforcement. The Stonewall Inn, the benchmark for gay bars at the time, is a natural target for the NYPD, not only for its perishing environment but also for its lack of a legal license to operate. Previously, several gay bars had been forced to close for not having a license.
Finally, in the early morning hours of June 28, after repeatedly going undercover at Stonewall, the NYPD decided to shut the place down by sending eight officers on a raid to try to control all the patrons in the bar. In a regular raid, patrons of a gay bar are asked to register their names in line, and all men dressed as women are arrested on charges of “transvestism”. However, many patrons refused to show their IDs this time, leading the police to decide to arrest everyone by force.
At the same time, more and more people gathered outside and the aggressive attitude of the police made the crowd inside and outside the tavern become discontented. As the crowd of onlookers grew, the anger gradually reached its peak. Believing that they should no longer take the abuse, a confrontation erupted between a masculine woman who was about to be taken to a police car and the police, which led to a riot.
Seeing that the situation could not be contained, the police began to use more violent methods to beat the crowd, but this only made the protest grow larger and larger. Angry crowds overturned police cars and threw coins and beer cans at the police. This spontaneous anger was a deliberate disruption of order, but more than that, it was a retort to the countless insults and violations of their rights. They did not want to give up their hard-won right to be treated equally in a private space. Hundreds of people chanting “gay power” eventually fought off the early morning attempts to arrest them, but predictably made Stonewall public enemy number one that the NYPD had to eliminate.
Instead of backing down in the face of the public’s righteous anger, police chose to send professional riot squads to Stonewall and its adjacent Christopher Park. Some high-ranking politicians suspected that the riot was abetted by the Black Panther Party, an armed Black rights group that was in full swing at the time. When riot police arrived the next day, thousands of people gathered around the blackened exterior walls of the Inn to fend off police intrusion and kiss each other publicly, knowing that public displays of affection between same-sex groups were still a huge taboo at the time.
Activist protesters began printing flyers calling for the operation of same-sex bars, for the mafia and police to be driven out of this neighborhood, and to make ownership of these areas their own. The riots eventually lasted five days and signaled the initial awakening of rights awareness for the same-sex community from New York to all of America.
It has been more than fifty years since the Stonewall riots, and while Stonewall has been actively commemorated by U.S. government officials and the NYPD commissioner apologized in 2019 for the actions of police officers during this riot, the scar has never healed. At almost every Pride march, groups divided from the mainstream would storm the parade to protest police brutality. For many of them, the fear of the police is real and sometimes deadly. At a time when white and cisgender gay, queer, and bisexual groups may no longer experience violence, Black and transgender groups still do not feel safe.
In May 2020, several police officers in Tallahassee, Florida, killed Tony McDade, a 38-year-old Black transgender man, while attempting to investigate a homicide without identifying themselves. According to eyewitness recollections, the officers yelled at McDade, “Freeze, n****r!” and shot and killed him without him making any movement. In the initial public police report, McDade was labeled as a “female,” which sparked a public outcry. According to the LGBTQ civil rights group Human Rights Campaign, McDade is the twelfth transgender person to be killed by police in just five months, despite being only 0.4 percent of the U.S. population.
For many people, especially those in the transgender and/or black communities, the presence of uniformed police officers at a march with them is a source of great anxiety. It is for this reason that groups such as Reclaim Pride, which has broken away from mainstream organizers, are reshaping their identity and security.
Each year on June 28, they take to the streets with the main organizers of the Pride parade, but not in the same neighborhood, as a silent protest against the group’s longstanding tolerance of police. For those Pride marchers who actively supported the ban on police participation, this trend was inevitable. In the early days of the LGBTQ movement’s rise to fame, the main organizers and participants were white cisgender men; as they aged and more and more members with diverse identities took up the baton of the movement, their experiences with these people’s different identities naturally gave them a very different view of police issues have very different views on police issues.
Police violence against the LGBTQ community throughout history and present day is indisputable, as it has long been the sword of Damocles over many people’s heads. McDade’s death is just the tip of the iceberg in the shadow of violence. While progressives continue to work to end discrimination through protests and legislation, many politically conservative activists are also trying their best to ensure that equality does not occur. Telling young LGBTQ activists that they cannot reject an institution that routinely mistreats them because it is “divisive”, especially doing so at an event set up to protest the institution’s practices in history, is an affront to Pride’s legacy.
It is clearly not the time to ask those in the young LGBTQ community to reconcile with law enforcement. A 2017 report from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), an anti-LGBTQ violence organization, shows that LGBTQ people continue to report a significant amount of police misconduct when in contact with police, and because of this, they are not willing to report crimes because of unfair treatment or assault. Of those members who reported incidents to the police, 48% reported police misconduct. Of those who had contact with the police, 66% reported hostile attitudes. Many police officers do not consider crimes against LGBTQ members to actually be hate crimes based on their identity, which naturally reduces their trust in the police.
A 2015 survey found that 2% of transgender people have been in jail or prison, almost twice the rate of cisgender people. In addition, 58% of transgender people reported some form of abuse by police in the course of law enforcement. Less than 10% of all American youth are not heterosexual, but in 2017, 20% of youth in juvenile justice facilities were gay or bisexual; 85% of these incarcerated LGBTQ and non-binary gender youth were people of color.
With structural inequities in criminal justice and health care, as well as potentially strained family relationships, economic insecurity that leads to a lack of housing, and the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans, the LGBTQ community is facing the worst of this international public health crisis on an unprecedented scale. This naturally leaves them feeling physically and emotionally exhausted and unwilling to continue pretending that a group that has long been hostile to them or even viewed them as enemies, can live together as equals peacefully.
When you are more likely to be unfairly targeted and abused by law enforcement, there is no doubt that you are less likely to seek their help. As a result, anti-LGBTQ hate incidents are grossly underreported every year. The government has made several political attempts to reform it, including a recent Supreme Court ruling that discrimination based on sexual orientation violates civil rights, but the trend is unlikely to change in the near future.
Take the example of Daniela Marroquin, a 40-year-old transgender Latina, who, one day in 2016, was walking home from a restaurant when she was attacked by an unfamiliar man using anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant discriminatory language. She intended to ignore it, but the man soon knocked her down and violently assaulted her. Although she chose to call the police and her attacker was quickly arrested, he was released after fourteen days because the officer who heard her statement did not speak Spanish and refused to accurately record the verbal discrimination she portrayed.
There are countless people like Marroquin who have been victims of multiple identity discrimination while having their experiences go unappreciated for these reasons. This has led to a helpless tacit agreement among members of the LGBTQ community, which means that they usually stay silent even when they experience discrimination and attacks.
History may have diluted the traumatic memory of Stonewall, and for many years people chose not to talk about certain hard truths while celebrating Pride Month, but that doesn’t mean that those things didn’t happen in the past, much less that the issues don’t continue to exist. As long as systematic oppression of the LGBTQ community, women, non-whites, and other identities remains through the violent tactics of law enforcement, there is no possibility of reconciliation between these two groups.
The Pride Parade, despite its long history of being marred by mainstream capital and politics in recent years, is long overdue for a return to its roots, to its essence of resistance and disobedience, in order to give a satisfactory account to the vast majority of young people who experience inequality and aspire to positive change.
