Pride: Not Everything that Glitters is Liberatory
Each June we celebrate Pride Month. This tradition is more than what mainstream culture shows on TV. It is more than a block party filled with screaming Queens. It is critical that we remember Pride was a political revolution in the fight for liberation. It was a fight for our right to exist in this world.
Pride began as a riot against the police, including burning at least one NYPD officer's vehicle. Yes, the lives of LGBTQ people have improved since then. Although trans folks were left out of most of the action and are only just getting SOME of the attention they deserve. Trans people were marginalized even within the LGBTQ community. Despite this mistreatment, two trans women's voices were loud and clear. Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera demanded "radical" things like housing for all, the release of all LGBTQ prisoners, and universal healthcare.
Those burning cop cars and radical demands of the government are the images and emotions evoked by Pride. It was the government that let us be ravaged by plague during the early HIV epidemic. During the Lavender Scare, the government outted countless government employees who were LGBTQ people to their families, blackmailed others, and coerced them to out others. Many committed suicide and /or were terminated from their job. Today, LGBTQ people are disproportionately incarcerated and while behind bars experience extreme neglect and abuse at the hands of the government. Someone make it make sense.
Today we have some semblance of equality. We have the right to marry, inclusion in non-discrimination laws, and anti-hate crime statutes. However, we will not attain genuine liberation from the root causes in the preceded paragraph. There is unfinished business because legal protections only go skin deep. It's the difference between a good retinol serum and a cheap lotion. She's just not giving.
Legal protections are...just legal protections. They do nothing to fundamentally shift the power or resources away from the government back toward the people. In fact, they make us more dependent upon the gov't and therefore more vulnerable to future blunders should the government ever flip her wig and come for us again. Acquiesence to a central authority and conformity with dominant culture disincentives community building which then makes us more reliant upon, and susceptible to government's benevolence or wrath.
It's hard to articulate but the analogy I'm thinking of is an overuse of antibiotics -it is a temporary protection that erodes our links, rather than a natural endurance that makes our links stronger.
It seems we exchanged our opportunity to boast queer neighborhoods, community based patrol watches, and caring circles. We traded a strong interdependent community, the potential for what could have been, for a piece of paper and legally enforceable rights in the courts of law. We traded the opportunity to work towards and carve out genuine liberation for a reified legal system. The same system that that vows to protect us from homophobia with one hand, yet smites us with the other through, among so many things, disproportionate rates of incarceration, and abysmal treatment and abuse while in prison.
Instead of painting rainbows on cop cars, let's light them on fire. Instead of photo ops with legislators, ask which laws and provisions in the state budget they passed to improve the lives of trans people. Instead of another night of drunk and naked debauchery, go volunteer with your local LGBTQ youth shelter or become pen pals with an incarcerated LGBTQ person.
As we go about the rest of June, let's remember the radical past, the inner strength required to continue to fight, and keep alive the dream for a community that cares about one another, knows each other's names, and leaves no queer outside of its loving embrace.