{"id":7679,"date":"2020-06-05T05:00:44","date_gmt":"2020-06-05T12:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/?p=7679"},"modified":"2020-06-05T05:00:44","modified_gmt":"2020-06-05T12:00:44","slug":"pride-rebellion-work-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/pride-rebellion-work-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Pride and Rebellion Work Together"},"content":{"rendered":"
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These times, are they a-<\/span><\/span>changin<\/span><\/span>\u2019, as Bob Dylan wrote? Are they?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I don\u2019t know.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What I do know\u2026 well, I guess I know a few things, but one of the weird ones is that it\u2019s Pride month. At least where it\u2019s not too hot to host Pride parades and festivals, June is when we celebrate LGBTQIA Pride.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Don\u2019t worry, I see you, Atlanta, and other Southern cities that have to wait until October. I see you and your parades and festivals coming up in the fall, and I look forward to hearing about them!)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So how can I write about Pride in a time like this?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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How can I, a white woman, write about anything like Pride in a season of uprising against racist brutality and the unsafe police state in which Black and brown people live in the United States?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Well, in one word, it\u2019s this: Stonewall.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There were several organizations serving lesbian and gay people before the \u201cStonewall Riots\u201d occurred. So why do so many of us\u2014me included\u2014think of Stonewall as the definitive beginning of what would become the LGBTQIA movement in the United States?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Let me tell you a little bit about Stonewall and why it\u2019s important. First, I\u2019ll begin with what came before Stonewall and the lives of queer people before the uprising in late June of 1969.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Until Stonewall, the lives of gay and lesbian (much less bisexual and trans people!) were marked by shame. They were marked, over and over, by police raids on our bars, by arrests, threats, and, essentially, the necessity to hide whenever possible. And hiding wasn\u2019t possible for some people, but for some it\u00a0<\/span><\/span>was. Some of \u201cus,\u201d could blend in. Some of us could fade into the suffocating atmosphere of straight culture, and some of us could not.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Drag queens and trans women tended to be arrested and caught up in police raids.\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Trans men, butches, and drag kings tended to be caught out on the\u00a0<\/span><\/span>streets, and<\/span><\/span>\u00a0beaten by the police or had their bodies checked in broad daylight to make sure they had \u201cwomen\u2019s\u201d underwear on. The \u201cthree-article\u201d rule (which never actually existed) was putatively understood to mean that any given person must be wearing at least three articles of clothing of the \u201cproper sex\u201d or they could be arrested. Similarly, 19<\/span>th<\/span><\/span>-century \u201cmasquerading\u201d laws were used to take people into police stations when trans and gender-nonconforming people were discovered on the streets or in bars.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Certainly, activities like dancing in bars was forbidden.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Enter the Mafia.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Mafia, who was willing to pay off the cops so that they\u2019d look the other way. The Mafia, who extorted people by making them sign their names so that they could be blackmailed if \u201cnecessary.\u201d The Mafia, who really didn\u2019t care one way or the other what happened to the people in the bar, but who knew they could make a mint on the place if they made it available.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One night, though, there was a police raid nonetheless, when the alcohol in the place was confiscated.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One night, the police got scared of the people they\u2019d scared into the streets and so they\u00a0<\/span><\/span>barricaded themselves<\/span><\/em>\u00a0into the bar!<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And they came back.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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They came back, and there was no fire exit. There was no other egress. The place was unsafe, barely restored, and not up to code, of course. Why would it be? It was a \u201cprivate club.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A gender-nonconforming person assigned female at birth was beaten by police with batons, and said at the top of their lungs, \u201cDo something!\u201d And they did. The people who had hidden in that shady,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>dim bar<\/span><\/span>, did something. And not just anything, but they\u00a0<\/span><\/span>fought back<\/span><\/em>. Many of them were taken to jail\u2014a VERY unsafe place for trans men and women,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>butches<\/span><\/span>\u00a0and queens.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And they kept fighting back. For days, the uprising went on.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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And this event,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>this event<\/span><\/em>\u00a0is the place from which so many of us mark our beginnings as out queer members of the society.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It is because of Stonewall that I could kiss my lovers on the street. It is because of Stonewall that I could walk without shame or fear \u2013 with pride, in fact \u2013 in my leather jacket with cock ring and handcuffs on the epaulets, hair shorn, earrings that were sharp enough they should have been illegal under the Geneva convention, smoking those Marlboro reds out of a signature extender.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And it is also because of Stonewall that I could not only be an edgy outsider who crossed boundaries and put my political, social, sexual, and spiritual life \u201cin your face,\u201d but it is also because of Stonewall that I am legally married. It is because we learned that rebellions, uprisings, riots\u00a0<\/span><\/span>work<\/span><\/em>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The idea that you have to make yourself \u201cacceptable\u201d or \u201crespectable\u201d to get things done is horseshit.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

If you find that it\u2019s a moment you can breathe and act and take a position, clearly, faithfully, and truly, please do so. If this is a moment you need just to breathe and drink from the endless Well of Divine Source, please do so. Drink and keep drinking. Never stop going back to that Source of Strength, Love, Justice, and Power. We all need it, whatever we are called to do; we all need the sustenance that going back to Source supplies.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These times, are they a-changin\u2019, as Bob Dylan wrote? Are they? I don\u2019t know. What I do know\u2026 well, I guess I know a few things, but one of the weird ones is that it\u2019s Pride month. At least where it\u2019s not too hot to host Pride parades and festivals, June is when we celebrate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7680,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7679"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7679\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}