The Stonewall Exception

queeranarchism:

howlfromthecore:

queeranarchism:

tubaterry:

queeranarchism:

agentduckorico:

queeranarchism:

I’m starting to feel very uneasy about the amount of attention that is given to Stonewall, and only to Stonewall.

You see, there is a long history of LGBT people (often transgender sex workers of color who were worst hit by police brutality) fighting cops. Before Stonewall, there were the Cooper Do-Nuts Riot (1959), the small California Hall Riot (1965), the Black Cat Cavern Riot (1966), the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot (1966) and many more lesser known riots big and small. After Stonewall, LGBT+ people continued to fight cops in the street, to resist arrest, to bash back and to riot. Queers riot all over history and they are rioting now.

But we only ever hear about Stonewall, seperated from it’s larger history of queer riots, seperated even from the decades of radical activism and defiant survival of the people that were actually at the riot.

I’m starting to think that is because people want to see Stonewall as the exception. The one justified riot. Unique in history. They can’t pretend that all LGBT history was non-violent, Stonewall is too famous for that. So instead they create the fiction that one riot was all it took to change the world and from that point forward everything could be civil and non-violent. Never mind that the system is still killing us.

I feel like Stonewall is being put on a pedestal as The One Riot to make new riots difficult to imagine. Dissertations on Stonewall are written by queer academics who have never fought for anything and would never condone queer riots today. A lot of LGBT activists consider themselves to be the radical children of Stonewall but the truth is they would snitch to the cops the moment we started to make weapons out of bottles and stones. They want the thrill of the romanticized history of struggle but not it’s reality, where we fight for our lives and the lives of our comrades.

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but I’m curious: why is Stonewall in particular the one that became famous?

Nah, it’s a very sensible question and I don’t have a single concrete answer.

Because it was in New York and the national media picked it up? Because it was bigger than the ones before and the media coverage brought more people to the streets and the riots lasted multiple nights? Because it tipped the balance on a movement that had been eager for its moment?

Sometimes one event in a line gets extra attention because of its scale, location and narrative, and becomes the symbol for the entire issue. Just like one school shooting, one refugee case, one murder-by-cop can become the one that launches a strong counter movement where many similar events before did not launch that wave.

But the wave had been building up before Stonewall. The civil rights movement politicized queer people of colour, the Vietnam War and the draft simultaneously caused a boom of the sex industry and a crack down on sex worker by conservative politicians, the publishing of The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966 and the availability on physical transition in Harry Benjamin’s practice in New York gave transgender women hope of a better future and an uncompromising approach towards transphobia.

A specific cocktail of rage and hope had build up and the dam was going to burst.

I wonder how much of the hyperfocus has to do with the institutional/cultural tendency to pretend big events are isolated incidents rather than the coming-to-a-head moments that they are.  (man status quo maintenance is easy when  your worldview prevents context from being a thing in the first place)

Yeah, definitely part of it. And generation upon generation of people raised on movies, books, games etc where one climax moment changes everything look for those patterns in life and in history and reproduce the same idea as a result.

I’m right along for this. Wondering if that’s why people are so quick to dismiss small actions, day-to-day organizing.

Yeah, it’s also why a lot of us activists still doubt ourselves even if we have a 40 page track record of actions, demonstrations, community work, results achieved and times when we carried someone through their dark times.

We’re told that change is created by a couple of famous names, the heroes, and if we are not at the absolute dazzling center of a massive dramatic story, then clearly we are not changing the world.

We can be pulling ten times our weight and still be doubting ourselves because we’re not larger-than-life-one-for-the-history-books-sized (& in reality no one is or was, anyone that ever created change had a shit ton of help).

Fuck that shit.