Well, for starters, I’d like us to think beyond and outside Stonewall. While clearly an important and historic event, pretending that this was the sole and singular event that somehow caused a radical uprising that then changed queer history for ever erases the fact that such moments of protest were going on before Stonewall, in the 1966 Compton’s riot in San Francisco, for example, or in Chicago, at the raid on The Trip, a gay bar, in 1968.
That being said, the commemoration of Stonewall or any queer uprising presents us with additional problems: on the one hand, mainstream gays and lesbians and straights continually erase the reality that such moments were largely initiated by trans people, hustlers, drag queens, very, very angry queens and queers – precisely the sort of misbehaving misfits they’d like to pretend don’t exist.
On the other hand, as the rest of us work to reinstate the central figures of Stonewall and other events and remind the world that Stonewall was not a Human Rights Campaign fundraiser, I’m also concerned about our unquestioned assumption that simply recovering these “forgotten heroes” is in itself a radical act. Yes, that resistance to authority was deeply important, but what were its long-term effects? And how did that resistance eventually become an anti-capitalist, anti-PIC movement as well? Well, we know that it did not, and what I see over and over again is a kind of recovery, which takes the form of “Stonewall was a riot,” or “Let’s not forget the drag queens,” but nothing beyond a fetishistic reclaiming of sexual identity as some kind of originary marker of radical politics. I’m impressed by any movement that challenges the status quo, but I also need to be clear on what that challenge represents and against whom.
Forty-two years later, we still see queers and straights being targeted for “sex crimes,” we still see the PIC growing in its capacity to profit from the incarceration of the economically and politically vulnerable, and there are now cases where people are being put in jail for debt, a resurrection of the long-ago debtors’ prisons. A lot of queers, especially the ones who don’t conform and can’t get jobs with health care and benefits, end up penniless; a lot of the drag queens and hustlers who participated in riots ended up bereft. I’m not interested in recovering any of them as lost heroes/heroines; I want to see more of a discussion about how they weren’t just screwed over by people who couldn’t stand their sexual identity, but by capitalism.
Frankly, I’m suffering from hero fatigue, and I’m tired of Pride parades which, even when they resist corporate takeovers, never go beyond some vaguely sexualized idea of a “radical” celebration that does nothing to really think through the neoliberal nightmare we live in.
I think Pride ought to become an occasion for queers to begin staging their own Prides, without corporate sponsorship, but with an awareness of the complications of economic and race issues. Currently, in Chicago, for instance, we have an alternative Dyke March, but it became, over the course of a decade, a predominantly white and middle-class event. Even after it moved locations (first to the predominantly Latin@ west side, then to the largely African-American South Shore) there’s a great deal of talk about alternative politics, but not very much conscious conversation about what it means to, essentially, stage Dyke March in these communities and not very much explicit engagement with people, including queers, who live there. Instead, one day a year, we “take over the streets,” and then disappear. I’ve been to the alternative Dyke three out of the four years so far, and I can see its value as a kind of annual resting space/networking tool for queers with alternative politics, but I wish we would drop the pretense that moving the location is more than just marching in a different place.
I’d also like to see a month-long series of radical events and actions that question the queer fealty to the prison industrial complex and to capitalism while critiquing our collective obsession with identity as some marker of freedom. Over the years, I’ve seen queers increasingly support the systems that incarcerate the most vulnerable and marginalized amongst us, in the shape of hate crimes legislation or by turning a blind eye upon the blatant targeting of queers who engage in public sex, for instance. I’d like to see more of an explicit conversation about how the prison industrial complex not only targets queers but actually requires their support to help further its expansion. And, yes, I’d like us to think about that in terms of capitalism and its deployment of the rhetoric of rights, which we embrace too readily. You’ll note that I don’t simply bracket off gays and lesbians as the problem; I think that too many self-identified “radical” queers buy into the idea that somehow simply claiming queerness as an identity is in and of itself a radical act.
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