I agree that part of the reason why cops are at Pride is to prevent LGBT people from rioting again, but I think this really ignores the role of race and class.
It’s easier for white and upper-class LGBT people to discourse about if straight people belong at Pride and if cishet celebrities should perform at pride or not, but many white LGBT people support the presence of cops at Pride because they think cops are their to protect them from bigoted protestors.
People like to cite “the first pride was a riot” when referencing Stonewall, but they love to ignore the context of Stonewall. It wasn’t just “gay people” who were rioting, it was a specific community of LGBT people: Black and Latina trans women, sex workers, and LGBT people of color. All of them were from working-class backgrounds.
There has always been a tension between the nonwhite, working-class components of the LGBT community and the upper-class, white components. It’s the white/upper-class components that tend to be more transmisogynisic and more hateful toward sex workers. It’s the white/upper-class components that historically disparaged gay bars and gay clubs. It’s the white/upper-class components that historically refused to participate in gay agitation and on-the-grounds protest. And now it’s the white/upper-class components that: 1) support the presence of cops at pride, 2) celebrate LGBT inclusion in the military, 3) think that gay cops and soldiers are a sign of progress, 4) are okay with corporations having floats and advertisements at Pride, 5) disapprove of BLM and Indigenous groups protesting imperialism and white supremacy at Pride, 6) tend to be more politically conservative and overtly racist, and 7) support white saviorism, imperialism, and display an orientalist attitude toward nonwhite and nonwestern cultures (e.g. claiming that nonwestern people are more inclined to be homophobic and that western countries are more progressive).
I am not making any of this up. Let’s take a look at history first, shall we? Here is a paper that describes racism at gay bars and clubs on Castro Street, San Francisco, a historical place of gay community building and activism.
Here is an image that I think is relevant as well:
This image is a comic from the 1986 issue of “Bi women: The Boston Bisexual Women’s Network Newsletter”. It’s clearly highlighting a tension between LGBT people who work for big businesses and corporations and LGBT people who are anticapitalists and anti-corporations.
Here is the recording of Sylvia Rivera’s famous “Y’all Better Quiet Down” speech. The link includes a transcript of the speech. In the speech she criticizes white, cis LGB people for being violently racist and transmisogynistic and for supporting assimilation over revolutionary liberation. She critiques the bureaucratic nature of elitist white-dominated LGBT organizations that usurp the labor of trans WOC and lgbt POC while also supporting causes that directly harm them.
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a Black trans woman and elder who was also present at Stonewall. Miss Major has always focused on trans liberation through a lens of prison abolition and community building.
You can also read this pdf describing the revolutionary actions of STAR (Street Tr*nsvestite Action Revolutionaries), the famous organization founded by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera here.
Other examples: La Luz Journal (a journal for lesbians of color) criticized the whiteness and assimilationist politics of pride, Ray Navarro wrote an article criticizing racism and antiblackness at Pride and in the community for the 1989 issue of Out Week, and Barbara Smith wrote an essay criticizing LGBT inclusion in the military in 1998.
Some of the historical LGBT activists were actively committed to anti-imperialism and severely criticized assimilationist politics in the LGBT community. This includes Leslie Feinberg, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, and Brenda Howard, among countless others who clashed with imperialists and assimilationists not just outside of the community but within the community as well.
Let’s now look at contemporary LGBT politics.
Plenty of white LGBT people support the presence of cops at Pride, and often clash with Black Lives Matter protestors who protest against the presence of cops at Pride. In June of 2017, for example, a mainstream LGBTQ group facilitated the arrest of Black Queer activists who were protesting at Pride and refused to apologize. #NoJusticeNoPride halted the parade in Washington DC in 2017 because DC Pride is actively funded and supported by corporations and organizations that fuel the settler colonial genocide of Indigenous people in the US & North America. In April of 2017, members of Trans Queer Pueblo faced racist and xenophobic backlash at Phoenix Pride when they protested in the name of rights for undocumented LGBTQ immigrants.
Another example of white LGBT racism is white same-gender couples joining white straight couples in exploiting women of color and nonwestern women in the name of adoption and surrogacy. Laura Briggs discuses the role of gay and lesbian couples in the transnational and transracial adoption industry in her book. Perhaps the most notorious contemporary example is the Devonte Hart case. Devonte Hart’s parents were white lesbians who adopted him and his siblings (all of whom were Black). A photo of Devonte hugging a cop in Portland, Oregon, was used as a symbol of “community harmony” by white people. The fact that his white lesbian mothers were passing around that photo as an example of “good cops” was suspicious enough. Tragically, it was revealed that Hart’s mothers were extremely abusive toward their children, and that the abuse was racially motivated, and this racist abuse culminated in the murder of Devonte and three of his siblings.
Here is an article that describes the antiblack myths regarding Black people who grow up in working-class environments in Chicago and here is another article that describes the symbolism of “pink capitalism” in Atlanta, Georgia. The role of people of color in establishing marriage equality in the US is often erased.
An entire theory to describe the galvanization of white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialist assimilation in the LGBT community post 9/11 was coined by Jasbir Puar, and is termed homonationalism. White LGBT people balk at the term and often call it homophobic, but plenty of examples of it exist (x, x). Because of both racism and homonationalism, as another example, refugees from nonwestern countries who want to gain asylum in Western nations are often asked to “prove” that they are actually gay, based on the stereotypes that people from those cultures are all homophobic and regressive and straight (read this academic paper that describes this phenomenon occurring in Canada).
Here is another paper on transnational queer solidarity and two lists of readings related to homonationalism and pinkwashing.
In short, I definitely agree that cops have a vested interest in controlling LGBT activism and preventing anti-cop agitation, but this falls on racial and class lines as well, and white/upper-class LGBT people have historically and currently contribute to this problem as well, and we cannot ignore that.
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