i get that americans love their cultural imperialism, but it really does piss me off that june is “international” pride month just because something happened in the united states.
in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.
But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.
our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1989. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.
anyway, happy pride, americans. i’m truly sorry that most of you don’t see the negative impact your nation’s culture has on the rest of the world. and to the rest of the world reading this, try searching for your own country and culture’s queer history, don’t accept the american narratives as your own. we deserve our own histories divorced from the cultural hegemony of the USA.
Read this post yesterday and I have not been able to stop thinking about it since. I am on a whole different continent than the op and it is still the same here. We are taught american queer history in school and none of our own. US queer liberation is seen as universal, even on the other side of the globe. I don't think the americans angry about this post realise that their history has culturally replaced ours and that even when doing research in our own languages we have to sift through article after article about the united states, and when finding something about our own countries it tends to just be a timeline of when things were decriminalised/legalised with little footnotes about who signed the act. Even in queer spaces the people that should be our icons are still unheard of, the people who gave us our rights are rarely written about and even when they are those texts don't reach the larger queer communities. We all need to take steps to decenter the US in our lives
