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.
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