A state senator said during a public forum in Tahlequah that LGBTQ+ people are “filth,” and that he and his constituents don’t want them in “our state.”
A state senator said during a public forum in Tahlequah that LGBTQ+ people are “filth,” and that he and his constituents don’t want them in “our state.”
Stonewall as a riot isn’t as notable as an outburst as it was a starting point. What would become the LGBTQIA+ of the time were underground. There were frequent police raids of establishments and there was violence all the time but none made the news. It was swept under the rug. Stonewall was noisy and it got a lot of the cis hetro folk actually talking about things that had previously been relegated to innuendo or silence.
In the aftermath of the riots the Queer community noticed and organized. There had been nice quiet liberation marches in the past where people dressed in their Sunday best and tried to look respectable or ride the line so people could be confused about who might actually be breaking some laws in bed. But they devised something noisier than a riot. Taking all the stuff reserved for the clubs and spilling them onto the street. Pride was conceived as an Independence day style celebration with “the Battle of Stonewall” as it’s memorial date. It was conceived at the time as a type of violence, not against people but against the silence. To keep people talking by being unabashed and even they were surprised how many queer people actually existed. The community due to external threat had been anonymized, atomized and carefully concealed so nobody had any clue how many queer people were actually out there. It was always just assumed to be a very few. Prides were hardcore shows of force where people courted arrest and police violence. One could see the continued Pride societies as being a safety measure. They are an organized entity, yes they are largely organizing parades and municipal events… But they are also highly socially connected and technically mobilizable. It’s a measure of keeping in touch and having an internal structure of people who know how to organize.
It’s also important to remember that the community has a continuity problem. There’s not as many queer elders as there should be because AIDS survivorship selected for those who were closeted, lived an exclusive heteronormative life style except for partner or just weren’t out having a good time in public. Those who remained to steer the ship were the quiet and mild mannered who were tangential to the violence. Everyone was slow to move on AIDS because it was thought to be a scourge on the obcene and it mowed down the community in the thousands. The crisis created a stunning loss of experienced liberation fighters at the same time it forged the survivors into a harder core of seige style organization with lesbians at the fore who used primarily beaurcratic means to fight. That beaurcratic framework is what survived and currently endures. It is quieter and fairly peaceable now but technically speaking you need a certain level of hardship and something that makes enough people angry to do violence to cause people to be primed to fight. The LGBTQIA are generally just invested in being happy and living their lives and their strongholds are cities. It’s harder to be queer in a smaller town when people like you are scattered over a distance because those connections are harder to maintain.
Ok, I’m not interested in that event though. Again, I was only remarking it is notable that there isnt violence targeted towards the repressors. That’s it. Hearing about an event from many years ago only proves the point.
I’m not saying stonewall was this, or that, or anything. I’m not discussing demonstrations, riots or any such gatherings, valid or not, violent or not.
I’m not advocating for violence or decrying it.
I’m only. Only. Only. Mentioning it is interesting that reality is a given way. That it’s remarkable. Your later discussion probably touches on why.
My dismissal of stonewall as a relevant point is only because it’s not of the type of event I was describing the absence of. Riots are not the type of premeditated, planned, definitive events I was describing the absence of.
Then you very obviously did not read the last half of my post which explains why the community is largely fairly beaurcratic and how we went from very punchy to fairly tame forms of resistance. The reason the movement works in rhetoric and democracy is tied up in a mass die off of the more revolutionary actors due to the AIDs crisis.
You literally cannot understand how the relationship of organized resistance for the modern movement is without recognizing the massive heelturn in strategic planning that the events of Stonewall and the AIDs crisis represented. You have to understand the psychological and social engineering of why people didn’t rise up earlier before that turn and the lessons that were learned and expanded upon to create a more aggressive approach. You can throw a tantrum about how people keep mentioning Stonewall when they talk about culture shifts or you can read past that and realize it for what it was. A massive shift in tactics that marked an actually very aggressive fight which changed again when the community started dropping like flies and other more subtle groups inside the movement became the ones keeping the lights on.
I’m not trying to understand anything! I literally made an observation. Not an argument FOR that observation. I only remarked that the LGBT community is harassed and targeted, and, it’s interesting that they are so peaceful. Thats it. Hard stop.
I was referring to targeted violence, not riots. That’s the only reason I discarded that event. I did not make claim that I needed an explanation or clarification.
I can understand the points you made just fine, and have all throughout this thread. Again and again I say: they are not on topic for my comment!
All I’m saying is that is is remarkable that there are not assassinations happening. I didn’t put a value judgement on that, or anything at all.
Assassinations and riots are entirely different.
You made a comment about admiring “self control” and then started talking about wanting examples for something that doesn’t exist and then people started talking about the types of resistance that DO exist because it seemed you wanted examples…
I think where this breaks down is that A) self control has nothing to do with it and people want to correct that misconception and B) you are asking for something more fundementally basic than people expect. Very well. Here is political resistance theory 101.
Assassinations tend to sow empathy for and consolidate the power/positions of the groups who are targeted. For example we look at JFK rather more warmly in retrospect then people did when he was alive. The criticism for risky political moves and his extramarital affairs made the question of his Presidential campaign being successful kind of anybody’s guess… But when election time rolled around LBJ won in a landslide victory the sort that is historic. Because all of a sudden his party had a martyr.
Assassinations don’t work…or they don’t work the way you think. Conservatives love cloaking themselves in the cosplay of being the oppressed. Nobody wants to fuel that delusion because they would use that to burn us all down.