“Fuck gay liberation!”: A Brief History of Pride Discontent

The first rebellion against Gay Pride happened at the first Gay Pride. Discontent against the white cis and heteronormative gay community is as old as the gay community itself.

The history of Pride discontent begins at the ’73 Pride: the first of them all. Sylvia Rivera, a transgender Latina and Stonewall veteran, had taken the stage. It was four years after the Stonewall Riots, riots that she often claimed she had instigated (the veracity of these boasts are under debate, and her story changed often). Still, there is very little doubt she was on the front lines, if not the instigator.

Despite her verifiable queer credits, she was about to be discouraged from the cause — and at Pride, no less. You see, Rivera had recently got into a nasty spat with Jean O’Leary, a white cis radical feminist. O’Leary claimed that transgender women were mocking cis women in their gender presentation, and aimed to take them down. (Judith Butler she ain’t — who we will get into later). At that Pride, she succeeded.

Rivera left the movement for decades. In 1998, Rivera said that she “get[s] depressed when [the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots] comes around” because she “still feel[s] like an outcast” (“Queens in Exile, the Forgotten Ones”).

Next on the schedule of the ’73 Pride was Lee Brewster, a transgender woman who had seen the battle between Rivera and O’Leary. She took her tiara off her head, and threw it into the crowd. “Fuck gay liberation!” she spat, and walked off the stage.

After that. there was no major discontent until the end of the millennium. 1999 brought with it the start of Gay Shame, a movement originally organised by a handful of radical queers. Nearly all modern Pride opposition and alternatives can trace their lineage back to Gay Shame.

At the time, Gay Shame was new; it was young and exciting, and it could still cover up its warts. After their SF clash with the main Gay Pride parade, Shame spread like… well, shame.

Shame had outreaches in every friendly metropolis, every metropolis where Pride had reached tipping point: where Pride was no longer a protest, but a parade.

But the empire of Shame fell. In-fights and petty squabbles brought the once-mighty kingdom to its knees. However, Shame has recently returned — at least to Duckie, which was its primary London purveyor. Duckie’s Shame this year is on the 27th of June, after years of hibernation. It will explore Border Control, a response to the xenophobia of UK politics — a xenophobia that even expands to the white queers of the UK. Even Judith Butler has grown uneasy with Pride’s racism, stating that she “must distance myself from this complicity with racism” when presented with an award at Christopher Street Day (a common non-American analogue to Gay Pride).

Pride has never been about pride for everyone; it has always been an exclusive event designed for the upper echelons of queer society. We cannot fix it — we just have to rip it down.