No pride in Stonewall
CommentsIt’s not about marriage per se, but my column for Pride month that questions what was so great about the Stonewall rebellion is up at the Web site of the Macon, Georgia Telegraph. The column is consistent with my complaint that gays and lesbians are so focused on being “equal” that they have no compassion for who they hurt, whether it’s orphans, Boy Scouts, or in this case, New York City cops. Some excerpts:
Stonewall is widely considered one of the gay and lesbian community’s proudest moments. The largest gay partisan organization is called the Stonewall Democrats, and every year various Stonewall Awards are handed out. But the gay community’s Stonewallapalooza shows serious errors in historical and moral judgment; the Stonewall riots are really nothing to be proud of.
Now I’m not defending police brutality, repressive bar raids or the tremendous discrimination gay people faced at the time. Nor am I a pacifist; some outrages (like torture or genocide) do call for violence. But the circumstances of gay life in the late 1960s, while certainly pain-filled and oppressive, did not justify spilling blood. Gay bar patrons weren’t being rounded up and executed. The Stonewall rioters weren’t even protesting the truly horrific aspects of gay life at the time, such as forced psychiatric shock therapy. They just wanted the police to leave their bars alone.
Could today’s Stonewall Democrats and Stonewall anniversary parade marchers possibly think the eponymous rebels were unaware of the tremendous civil-rights progress made that very decade through sit-ins, marches and other nonviolent means? Or, worse, that this aggressive hissy fit was essentially the same as those peaceful protests? Perhaps.
Even gay Christian nonviolence advocate Mel White has compared Stonewall to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1964. Preposterous - a drag queen throwing a beer bottle at a cop is no Rosa Parks.
Maybe many gays do consider the Stonewall mayhem justified - because cross-dressing and male-male dancing were illegal, because bar busts interrupted same-sex flirting or even because Judy Garland had just been laid to rest. Even so, surely we’ve chosen the wrong memory through which to unify a diverse community that includes many segments - like lesbian Quakers and gay Republicans - unsympathetic to rioting as a political technique.
There’s plenty in gay and lesbian history that deserves celebration - talented artists like playwright Lorraine Hansberry and true heroes like 9/11’s Mark Bingham. I call on my fellow gays and lesbians to create holidays and events that honor them, and name our organizations after their achievements. Nearly 40 years after Stonewall, a community that once sang “we are a gentle, angry people” should be mature enough to examine the moral dimensions of even its most-cherished myths.
UPDATE: Rev. Mel White, a practitioner of violence whom I criticize above, has written me to praise my “well-said” column: “You write very well. And the column was carefully researched and clearly written.”
Rev. White (who along with Rev. Troy Perry is one of the two most prominent gay Christians in America) followed up: “Violence (at Stonewall) got the world’s attention. As I know all too well, nonviolence is usually ignored and nonviolent acts go unreported and unnoticed. There is the dilemma. We celebrate Stonewall because it finally got our cause noticed (as did Rosa’s nonviolent protest on the bus). But as you’ve pointed out in your article we also should feel saddened that it was violence that brought our cause to the nation. Thank God it didn’t end up the Stonewall Massacre with deaths on either or both sides. And come to think about it, it is a wonder that more acts of violence didn’t follow from our community. Now, the lesson is learned. Violence gets people’s attention. Nonviolence often doesn’t. It’s a puzzlement. Soulforce always uses nonviolence but without arrests (media driven street theater) and without some kind of ‘incident’ our nonviolent demonstrations end up unnoticed and thus ineffectual, except on those who protest with us and they are changed forever.”
David: ‘Could today’s Stonewall Democrats and Stonewall anniversary parade marchers possibly think the eponymous rebels were unaware of the tremendous civil-rights progress made that very decade through sit-ins, marches and other nonviolent means?’
Trivially they could if, like many of the younger generation, it’s just a legend of a far-off time and place. But they could also reasonably believe it if they’d read up on it a bit. After all, the raid that sparked the riot was an aggressive throwback to the bad old days that appears to have been ordered by the Mayor John Lindsay to burnish his law and order credentials and get reelected after he’d lost the Republican primary. Whereas indeed gay right groups had mostly beaten back the raids to sporadic and largely token affairs in the early evening, with the bar reopening the same evening, this one was an aggressive one in prime business hours and many were arrested from the very beginning. So the rebels might very reasonably have thought that peaceful efforts had come to naught.
‘Preposterous - a drag queen throwing a beer bottle at a cop is no Rosa Parks.’
Your sneering contempt for drag queens makes me all the more certain that we did settle on the right symbol after all. My partner was in drag when I met him. Of course, for him it’s a once or twice a year bit of fun rather than something existential, but that doesn’t make him either better or worse than those for whom it is.
I was and continue to be upset by a heavily gay gym in West Hollywood that was part of a national chain that posted a sign that said “Don’t be sissies! Come to our “boot camp” and get in shape. Sign up with one of our personal trainers at the front desk.”
I complained that the sign was homophobic because “sissy” has long been a term of contempt for effeminate and gay men, and preposterously I was told, “This is not a gay gym. We have to be here for everyone.” Everyone including anti-gay bullies? I convinced a local gay newspaper to write an article about it and we called the company’s headquarters but the sign stayed up until the national campaign ended.
Peaceful efforts had come to naught. Would it have been reasonable therefore to throw full bottles of beer at the heads of the personal trainers at the gym? Should we have locked the manager and other employees inside the gym, doused it with lighter fluid and tried to set the building on fire?
Are you saying that people should be allowed to drink at an unlicensed, Mafia-run bar without any legal consequences because it was a haven for gay people? What other illegal acts should gay people get the “special right” to violate?
I don’t follow how you know I was “sneering” at the drag queen because she was in drag rather than because of her inappropriate violence. Descriptions of Stonewall tend to talk more about drag queens (and that’s the term they usually use) than any other group. Even if drag queens were a minority of the Stonewall rebels (and I don’t know that they were) why can admirers of Stonewall who are experts at gay history mention the drag queens, but opponents of Stonewall who are also experts at gay history not do so? I do not understand.
David: “Peaceful efforts had come to naught. Would it have been reasonable therefore to throw full bottles of beer at the heads of the personal trainers at the gym? Should we have locked the manager and other employees inside the gym, doused it with lighter fluid and tried to set the building on fire?”
Entrapment in a potentially lethal situation is certainly a bit disproportionate for a tasteless slogan. It’s even disproportionate for a punitive police raid where passers-by had already been hauled in and beaten by the police, so I don’t defend that particular bit. But a riot in response to unjust laws arbitrarily enforced? Why the hell not?
‘Are you saying that people should be allowed to drink at an unlicensed, Mafia-run bar without any legal consequences because it was a haven for gay people?’
Yes and no. I’m saying that gay people should, morally, be able to have a place to drink with each other, and if the business model for legitimate gay bars is problematic because the police keep raiding them as a proxy for enforcing unjust sodomy laws, then I’m prepared to cut gay people who drink at unlicensed or Mafia-run bars a bit of slack.
‘I don’t follow how you know I was “sneering” at the drag queen because she was in drag rather than because of her inappropriate violence. ‘
Fair point - I don’t know. I can tell you why I got that impression though: because you’d just finished describing the violence as a hissy fit.
Mark-
I don’t have a problem with anything you say here. I wrote the “hissy fit” comment five years ago and nobody has ever pointed it out as potentially transphobic before. (Certainly the lesbian and gay man who edited the column didn’t catch it.) I will try not to use that term to refer to drag queens or MTF transgender people again. I assure you the slight was unintentional. It reminds me of my professor who described the reaction of the African-American theme house at Stanford when a racist poster was found on the wall: Ujamaa went ape.
He may have had racism in his unconscious when he said that, but there were a few African-Americans in the room and even haters and bigots rarely insult blacks to their faces. When the, er, diction problem was pointed out to him he was completely mortified and apologized actually a little too much for everyone’s comfort.