The Politics of Pride & POC
In 2021, LGBT+ is highly visible and celebrated throughout many aspects of American society. This popularization of Pride reflects the broader visibility of LGBT+ people, culture and political struggles in the U.S. and around the world. Just 10 years ago, such widespread acceptance and celebration would be unimaginable, yet today’s Pride celebrations demonstrate the significant gains the LGBT+ community has made in combating homophobia and transphobia.
Within every radical people’s struggle movement, however, there comes a time when that radicalism is deemed a threat by powerful actors. The struggle risks becoming co-opted and made palatable for mainstream consumption — and Pride is no exception. The Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements serve as other recent examples.
Contemporary mainstream bourgeois liberal feminism, or the ideology of “white feminism,” tends to cling to pro-capitalist ideals that result in the perpetuation of patriarchal oppression and white supremacy. It is important for us to consider and reflect on the ways in which mainstream bourgeois feminism and Pride may fail to sufficiently pay attention to the politics of race in discussions of gender and sexuality.
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Origins of Pride
In recent years, there have been various attempts to whitewash the history of the Stonewall riots, the event that initiated Pride. The riots were caused by a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, on June 28, 1969. In response to this police violence, a crowd of people gathered outside the bar and started an uprising against police arrests by fighting back.
It is debated as to how the riots truly began. For example, many historical accounts credit the first brick thrower to be either trans activists Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera. However, both Johnson and Rivera denied these claims. What is important to remember, as said by Chrysanthemum Tran for them, is that these activists’ legacies shouldn’t be mythologized so as to erase the efforts of a mass movement that rebelled and worked toward liberation. According to eyewitnesses, some of the most marginalized groups within the LGBT+ community — such as “street kids, trans women, and queer youth of color” — played a critical role in the riot.
Despite this history of POC and other marginalized groups being critical leaders in the LGBT+ movement, these groups still face marginalization from hegemonic forces within the LGBT+ community. In 2015, for example, the film “Stonewall” was released, depicting a fictionalized account of the Stonewall riots. This particular film primarily centered white, cisgender, male voices instead of more accurately reflecting the diverse crowd of participants at the riots. The film garnered much criticism for this reason.
Only a couple of years later in 2017, the film “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson” was released on Netflix, but also received criticism as the filmmaker — David France, who is a cisgender, white man — was accused by Tourmaline — who is a Black, transgender activist, filmmaker and writer — of using her work in the film without receiving credit. While France denied this accusation, the situation ironically still demonstrates the ways in which the work and legacies of Black, trans activists are not as prominently acknowledged within the LGBT+ community.
As a change of pace, in 2020, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter uprising, massive protests took place to honor the lives of murdered Black trans women and protest the violence they face. The 2020 protests seem to have been a wake-up call for the LGBT+ community to make the movement more intersectional. A prominent example came recently from New York City’s Pride Parade which banned police presence until 2025. Furthermore, in 2019, the Reclaim Pride Coalition organized the Queer Liberation March in New York City as a way to reclaim the radical legacy of the Stonewall riots and resist the corporatization of Pride.
In the current era of a corporate, commercialized pride, it is imperative to remember the radical and revolutionary roots of Pride Month that were particularly spearheaded by queer communities of color. The purpose of Pride is to live without shame about one's identity; it is a political stance, and it must be embraced as both radical and intersectional.
Written by Olivia Deally
