https://socialistaction.org/2017/07/01/ambivalent-pride/
Ambivalent Pride
/ 21 hours ago
July 2017 Pride 2By JERICHO JONES
This time of year we have reason to look with rejoicing at Gay Pride
celebrations around the world. Their number, persistence, and exuberance
were unimaginable to this lonely queer kid growing up in the 1970s. To
think there was any place you could be openly, even flagrantly gay was
like oxygen. Today, hundreds of pride celebrations offer queer kids
almost anywhere the hope of finding a place of relative freedom.
Yet in spite of our advances, we still live under the threat of violence
driven by hate. Not two weeks ago, we marked the first anniversary of
the Pulse Nightclub shooting, the deadliest mass shooting by one person
in U.S. history. Barely a week seems to pass between reports of vicious
and deadly attacks on transsexual women. Stonewall may have been nearly
50 years ago, but we are still awash in hate.
Experience shows that facts and argument don’t counter hate, but knowing
a queer person and feeling empathy can. Decades of painful, frequently
dangerous coming out have given many of us a world where queer people
can hope to find a place to live and prosper. The importance of showing
pride to the world hasn’t become any less urgent.
Even so, Gay Pride is the season of ambivalence for me. Early on, it
represented a radical demonstration that queer people not only refuse to
be silent but insist on making their presence undeniable. In the years
since, it has become something distinctly different. What once
celebrated the freewheeling sense of possibility at the heart of queer
life has become an opportunity for corporate marketing and for
solidarity among queers who happen to live and look like the majority.
This was demonstrated recently by the interruption of Washington Pride
by a radical group called No Justice, No Pride. Primary among their
issues was the inclusion of the police in Pride, with its obvious
approval by Pride organizers.
It’s stunning: never mind the obvious fact that the police have long
been one of the threatening forces that queer people battle to live
normal lives, Washington Pride (and others) included and celebrated an
institution that regularly murders African Americans. Yet there was
widespread condemnation of No Justice, No Pride for interfering in the
party, not for the organizers who planned a party that pointedly
included racist killers.
Then there is the corporatization of Pride. These celebrations nearly
always include corporate sponsorship, i.e., plastering the event with
company logos for advertising. Washington Pride was sponsored by a
number of corporations, among them Wells Fargo Bank.
On the surface, this is normal—the bank is looking for customers, the
organizers are looking for someone to pay the bills. But No Justice, No
Peace was aware of something critical that Washington Pride organizers
ignored: Wells Fargo is an investor in the Dakota Access Pipeline, which
is being built by force, with (of course) police protection, next to the
water supply of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, while the pipeline
studiously avoids the white city nearby. Wells Fargo has also been
forced to pay $175 million for discrimination against Black and Latinx
customers.
Thus, with the police/corporate invasion, Pride has become an
opportunity for pinkwashing, which is the use of gay inclusion to cover
institutional misdeeds. In the cases of Wells Fargo and the police, the
cover is for murder and economic violence committed by powerful
institutions at the heart of the establishment.
And it isn’t just corporate sponsorship or the welcoming of
authoritarian institutions that mark Pride’s dedication to established
power; it’s also observable in the make-up of Pride organizers and
celebrants, who are mostly white and cis, and often mostly male. Why
would Pride be any more responsive to the needs of outsiders than Wells
Fargo or the police when they are all overwhelmingly controlled by insiders?
Even tragedy has not moved Pride. The victims and survivors at Pulse
Nightclub last Pride season were mostly Latinx. The murdered transwomen
mentioned above have mostly been women of color. The names of Black
people murdered by police—the ones deemed newsworthy—appear in the media
almost every week. How do we celebrate Pride when so many are ignored
while Pride celebrates the wealthy and powerful?
All I can offer is a reminder of the outsiders who gave us the origin of
Pride, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn who, early on the morning of
June 28, 1969, decided they had had it with police harassment and
rioted. That is, they protested with violence, smashing windows, setting
fire to cars, and throwing pieces of the street at police. The rioters
were not polite, well-connected cis gay men in suits, but marginalized
queers, trans women of color, butch lesbians, and drag queens.
And they did not quit, as the rioting continued a second night and went
on to inspire the gay liberation movement in ways polite white homophile
organizations like the Mattachine Society never did and never could.
These queer forbearers showed us that change does not come from
appealing to wealth and power, but from standing against them without
apology. The struggles for Black civil rights and the history of the
labor movement showed us the same. That Pride would leave trans people
and queer people of color behind is unconscionable. Red Rose Socialists
stands—always—with the marginalized, the powerless, and the voiceless in
their struggles.
The author is a member of Red Rose Socialists in Lancaster, Pa.
Photo by Dylan Comstock: No Justice, No Pride demonstrators in
Washington, D.C.
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July 1, 2017 in LGBT rights.
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