No Single Issued Systems, by Regi Worles

            A queer resistance is dependent on some sort of queer existence. Yet, when many of us queer folks are fighting for our rights, we aren’t seeing that. What we see is our own context, our own fight, but this fight is not just ours. When we begin to fight for queer rights we join a decades-long legacy of activism. Our definitions have gotten to be more encompassing and more representative of those of us on the margins because of our sexual or gender identities, our fight is still one large, discursive story. Still, many of us, because of our own lack of research, educational policies, etc., begin our fight for queer justice fighting from a cup that is barely full. In this case, the cup should be full of consciousness. The cup should be full of our collective history and what it means for us to be able to draw on the wisdom of those before us that engaged in this fight in ways that were true to them. The question then becomes why is this history so important? What is it about this history that makes leading activism without it have the empty quality about it?

            It is of interest to us to retrofit ourselves into history in order to connect us to a collective consciousness of queerness. This consciousness, much like the waves of queer resistance in our United States context, does not have to be universal, but it does have to be ubiquitous. Ubiquitous in our knowledge and built consciousness around it. Perhaps a section of this history that is important for us to note is how the movement of queer resistance evolved around the concepts of what would be coined later as intersectionality.

In thinking about Stonewall, for example, intersectionality had a large role to play. In my organizing, the public has recently been able to share and hear about the work that folks like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivero did for the movement for their work before, during, and after Stonewall. Understanding Stonewall as an event that held potential for queer action and not simply an isolated moment of unplanned queer anger is important in this context. One of the first things that I learned from the work that John D’Emilo’s work, After Stonewall, was that the Stonewall riot was not an event that appeared through osmosis, but that it was a reaction to a series of events that we rarely hear about in our mainstream understanding of the event. In fact, the Civil Rights movement had an impact on the work that queer folks were doing and as time moved forward and activism picked up riots were not something that were rare, (D’Emilio 5). In the few months before this event, many of the gay bars had stopped being targeted, there was a sense of peace in the establishments. So, when the police started to raid the bars again to gain political capital for a local election, the results ultimately led to Stonewall. The people involved, many young gay men of color, took to action.

This is where the intersectional necessity of the movement began. The tactics employed at Stonewall were eerily similar to a lot of direct protest action of that time, especially those tactics that were utilized by the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, (D’Emilio 5). Still, Stonewall was more than just a one-time occurrence. From the action that was taken at Stonewall, a new type of queer consciousness formed, one that that was a bit more direct in approach and shifted in focus. The pre-Stonewall movements were normally focused on trying to create cultural change around the stigmas of being attracted to the same sex, through the use of rhetoric focused on trying to make gay people the same as everyone else. After Stonewall however, the main movement’s focus shifted. There was a pride in being gay, and even more importantly in that celebratory state, the focus was that gay people were different and they still deserved to be treated with dignity and respect. This shift was resulting in an understanding of the Gay Liberation movement’s role in the revolution. Trying to fight for a complete revolution wherein the right of gays and lesbians were considered was different than fighting for individual rights of gays and lesbians on their own. There was an understanding from this movement that all oppressions were tied together; which meant that in order to liberate themselves from anti-gay culture and policy, the movement had to find how they were linked to other movements.

 Although, there was a lot of middle-class involvement in this work, many of the folks engaging in pro gay activism were doing their best to understand how they were complicit and negatively affected by all systems of oppression, not just the systems that were impacting them. We know that this era of activism using intersectionality as a tool to engage in a fight for a collective revolution eventually died, but some of the tactics and ways of understanding how we ought to form and understand queer activism have been and still are useful to us today. As we continue to engage in the work of liberation and celebration we must remember that queer people exist in all sorts of ways and that the systems that are bringing us down are normally not single-issue systems. Meaning that when we are engaging in our justice work, we must try not to understand ourselves as single-issue people, but rather folks working one piece of a multi-faceted issue.