Pride celebrations usually occur in June in commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall riots, when police raided the Stonewall bar in New York, and the patrons, especially drag queens of color, fought back. Clashes between police and the gay and lesbian community continued for several days, and the incident is considered a turning point in the modern gay movement. Marches were held the next June in New York and San Franciso, and Pride Parades and events now occur all over the world, including Sao Paolo, Jerusalem, Taipei, and, of course, Portland.
Last month, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, gay and lesbian activists attempted to hold Russia's first gay pride march in Moscow, timed to coincide with the 13th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Russia. Although the march was thwarted by opposition from police and from nationalist and fundamentalist opponents, organizers considered the turnout a sign of victory, as queer Russians claimed their rights to public space.
But in the US, Pride events have other problems, too. Ryan Murphy, on his blog liberalserving,
bewails the commodification of pride, asking,
From a spontaneous riot of trans women and other sundry queers who were fed up with police harassment evolves . . . - a corporate branding opportunity?. . . .Charlie Hinton, writing last month in dissidentvoice.org, recalls that
How can they crap all over us in legal discrimination after constitutional amendment but throw products and advertising at us like we're Jane Q American?
In 1975, [he] became a founding member of an historic organization called Bay Area Gay Liberation. This was the time of the war against Viet Nam, the civil rights movement, black power, brown power, and women’s liberation. [Queers] became the next group to challenge the traditional values of heterosexual white male ruling class dominance. . . .Hinton advocates returning to a liberation approach.
The idea behind gay liberation is that no one is free until all are free. The politics of liberation advocate building a united movement to overcome all forms of discrimination and oppression, if LGBT people are someday to be truly free. . . .
In the late 1970s, a gay rights approach to gaining equality became the dominant ideology in the lesbian/gay movement, replacing the gay liberation approach. The idea behind gay rights is more limited -- build a movement that addresses strictly gay issues -- housing and job discrimination, military, marriage/partnership, etc. and unite solely on the basis that we’re gay; Gay Pride Day [being a] good example.
At the very least, gay men should unite with women to protect choice and reproductive rights. The same groups are trying to take away all our rights (as well as any rights for immigrants and prisoners) and it’s stupid and self-defeating not to join forces to fight them together. . . .And speaking of Iraq, Gary Leupp, also on dissidentvoice, observes that even
In the bigger global picture, it’s the same anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-democratic Right wing forces that drive the conservative agenda, which includes the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, and unquestioning support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine. . . .
Do we make the world safer with more war and more and bigger weapons, or with more justice and equality that all can share?
Leaving aside the daily “collateral damage” killings of Iraqi civilians, and the occupiers’ failure to accomplish the most basic reconstruction goals, the collapse of law and order and accompanying empowerment of fanatic religious militias has made life hell for women, Christians and other religious minorities, and intellectuals, [and, of course, for queers]
Last month Ali Hili, who used to run a gay nightclub in Baghdad, told The Times of London he knows of more than 40 Iraqi gay men killed this year. “We could never envisage this happening when Saddam was overthrown,” the 33-year-old now in exile declared. “I had no love for the former president, but his regime never persecuted the gay community.” He told Democracy Now!, “It’s a very dark age for gays and lesbians and transsexuals and bisexuals in Iraq right now. And the fact that Iraq has been shifted from a secular state into a religious state was completely, completely horrific.”
In April 2005, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani declared that homosexuals should be killed in the “worst, most severe way.” [and Iraqi militia have been] tracking down and brutally murdering gay men and boys. Last month, following the murder of a 14-year-old boy by the Iraqi police, al-Sistani removed the anti-gay male fatwa from his website (retaining one against lesbians). Not that this will necessarily change the militiamen’s behavior towards gays.
Al-Sistani is of course viewed by the occupiers as an ally of sorts, since he has discouraged armed resistance and commands the respect of the . . . Shiite politicians. So while officially “troubled” by the bourgeoning misogyny, religious intolerance, anti-intellectual and homophobic plagues unleashed by the illegal overthrow of the former regime, U.S. spokespersons can’t attack too squarely the Muslim fundamentalist repression exercised by their sometimes allies.
“If someone is in danger of being slaughtered or persecuted, we do all we can to stop it,” says Army Maj. Joseph Todd Breasseale, chief of the Media Relations Division of the Multinational Corps in Iraq. In other words, the U.S. military, which officially regards bans gays who are out unsuitable for military service, does want to stop the slaughter of Iraqi gays. But he adds:
“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, when we’re in a fledgling time like this, to go in and say, ‘Here’s these issues that are going to repel 80 percent of the population and this is what we want to inflict on you.’ We’re trying not to get into too many values judgment type issues and just do the right thing.” That’s what Breasseale told the Washington Blade, the capital’s GLBT newspaper.
So let me get this straight. [Leupp continues] In this “fledgling time,” while the primordial chaos of the criminal invasion still prevails, the occupiers -- bogged down in suppressing resistance to their presence, slaughtering civilians in the process -- haven’t much wherewithal to prevent other, indigenous Iraqi slaughter. . . .The occupiers have better things to do than to “get into” the “values judgment issue” of shooting 14-year-old gay boys, especially if 80% of the population has no problem with that. That’d be “inflicting” somebody else’s values (although not, apparently, the Major’s), and that just wouldn’t make sense, would it?
So doing the “right thing” must mean doing something else: publicly acknowledging that gay people shouldn’t be murdered, probably, and it’s not the occupiers’ policy that they should be. But, hey, this is the Iraqis’ business. At least they’re free now.
