Celebration Isn't Revolution
Pride month has never represented the queer community as it exists and can't be expected to. But the determination for justice that inspired the 1969 rebellion is something we can embrace
Today’s Pride celebrations should belong to the young, so I asked my guest writer Hannah Leffingwell to reflect on this annual event. Leffingwell is a doctoral candidate in History and French Studies at New York University. If you know someone who would appreciate this post, please:
Not surprisingly, given a year of attacks on LGBTQ+ people, Pride Month drew more than its usual share of controversies. Marches were canceled in Republican-led states like Florida, with organizers citing safety concerns. Other events, like Kansas’s Salt City Pride Fest, were rescinded by venues that feared legal action because of new anti-drag laws restricting so-called “adult” performances in the presence of children.
At the same time, an uptick in corporate virtue signaling has accompanied the meteoric rise of hateful legislation targeting LGBTQ+ people. Corporate recognition as a form of national belonging has always been an ironic theme of Pride Month. Erin Reed, a reporter and activist who has done incredible work covering anti-LGBTQ+ legislation across the country (you can subscribe to her Substack here), described this corporate hypocrisy: “The first Pride was a riot, and its early celebrations were not about touting corporate advocacy or organizational support for queer people, but rather about fostering our own communities and networks to ensure that overt oppression would never prevail.”
“The first Pride was a riot” reminds us that there should be nothing nice or acquiescent about Pride. Pride is not a parade or a spectacle; it is a protest. It is meant to be inconvenient. The phrase is shorthand for a long history of protest and resistance by queer people, revolutions that began at places like the Dewey’s Restaurant, Compton’s Cafeteria, and the Stonewall Inn.
But the first “Pride” event, or at least the first event associated with that moniker, was not, in fact, a riot. The first “Pride” was a planned demonstration, and it was intended to commemorate (not reproduce) the Stonewall uprising that erupted spontaneously on June 28, 1969. The rebellion, which had included several days of street fighting between queers and cops, inspired gay liberationists and homophile activists to organize the first ever “Gay Pride Week” one year later. The name of the week and its culminating demonstration notably left out the name of the business where it had all started, the Stonewall Inn.
As Heather White explains in her book Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (UNC Press, 2015), these gay liberationists’ ritual reenactment of the Stonewall uprising was far from spontaneous. The “tamed and stylized versions of a street raid” performed by gay activists in New York in June of 1970 were intended to commemorate the “birth” of the gay liberation movement but not to wreak havoc on the streets, as a riot typically would.
The Gay Liberation Front, unlike the spontaneous explosions of queer civil disobedience that preceded it, was predominantly white and cisgender and by no means representative of the queer population of New York, much less the United States. Members of the GLF could refashion the Stonewall riots into a ritual reenactment precisely because the events of June 1969 had not resulted in a revolution, nor did they signal a decisive shift in social perceptions of queer people.
Stonewall also did not catch the attention of politicians, in part because major media outlets covered it sparsely. In the months following Stonewall, the political establishment failed to draft or even consider rescinding anti-gay laws affecting liquor licenses, cabaret licenses, solicitation, and cross-dressing in public that had long ensnared marginalized people like the Stonewall rioters in an endless loop of arrest, police violence, incarceration, and fines.
As Miss Major—a trans activist and participant in the Stonewall uprising—put it in a recent interview:
The night of Stonewall is how people talk about it, but it was more like a week. We were fighting for our lives. They’re still killing us; they’re still not giving us the respect we’re due for putting up with their shit all these years. When a parade happened the year after Stonewall, I couldn’t find us anywhere. Not one of my gurls. I didn’t see Sylvia there, in the front, where she should’ve been. But it’s not about me or Sylvia. I don’t give a shit whether they acknowledge or know about me, but those gays and lesbians were ashamed to be seen with us, and they still want us erased. So for my gurls, it’s as if Stonewall never happened because it didn’t change anything for us.
To the poor and disenfranchised, the Stonewall uprising was hardly a watershed moment. It only became a watershed moment because gay liberationists treated it as such in later years—shaping radical, spontaneous civil disorder into a clean narrative that could be reproduced and commemorated on a mass scale. For decades, trans participants were largely misrepresented or excised from the story.
Notably, queer activists outside of the city bristled against the New York-centric narrative of Pride, especially those who had resisted homophobic police violence in the years before Stonewall. Though New York's Christopher Street Liberation Day aspired to be "the largest homophile demonstration in history," Los Angeles earned the distinction of hosting the country's first "gay parade." In 1970, activists hosted "Christopher Street West: A Freedom Revival in Lavender," which boasted floats, motorcycles, horses, and drummers. Heather White describes the event as a mixture of "protest theater and camp festival." Included on the docket was a float staging a mock crucifixion, complete with a sign that read "Crucified by the LAPD."
These lesser-known stories about the history of Pride should remind us that Pride, as it currently exists, is a sanitized, permitted corporate parade. It has nothing to do with Stonewall— as important as that event was—or the radical politics associated with the uprising. Reduced to a complex public relations dance, Pride as we know it does not accurately commemorate the events of that summer. If anything, it undermines the radical demands of Stonewall's most courageous resisters, reducing them to hashtags and merch.
You would be hard-pressed to find a better illustration of this than the recent controversy over the Los Angeles Dodgers' annual Pride Night. On May 17th, social media erupted as the Dodgers announced that they would no longer invite The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—a queer activist group who dress (and in most cases, cross-dress) as nuns—to attend the celebration. The group had been slated to receive the baseball team's Community Hero Award. Instead, they were publicly snubbed and had their invitation withdrawn after backlash from conservative Catholic groups. Then, in an equally embarrassing about-face, the Dodgers apologized to the Sisters, announcing that their invitation to Pride Night had been reinstated and that the team intended to "educate" themselves about LGBTQ+ issues to avoid future controversies.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are one of the few organizations still carrying on the radical legacy of Stonewall rioters, which clearly escaped the Dodgers public relations department. Founded in 1979, the Sisters are a worldwide order of (mostly) queer nuns who have served the LGBTQ+ community since the dawn of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Some Sisters have a preexisting relationship with Catholicism. Many do not. Religious belief is not a prerequisite for taking vows, but a commitment to serving the queer community is. People of all genders can take vows as Sisters: they are for life like any monastic vows.
Though the Sisters, cloaked in elaborate nun's habits and iconic face makeup, spend much of their time parodying the Roman Catholic Church, they "consider themselves quite seriously to be nuns," as Melissa M. Wilcox writes in her book Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody (NYU, 2018), creating "space for both vocal political protest and day-to-day community service and activism." Sister Dietrich Anne DiMaggio, who co-founded the Baltimore house of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, describes the Sisters' mission as "fun raising, fund raising and hell raising."
I was fortunate to have Sister Dietrich as a guest in my queer history class this semester. They arrived "in face," as the Sisters say: wearing white makeup and crowned with one of the house's signature coronets. "We serve our communities in the way religious orders do their communities," Sister Dietrich explained, "as religion turned their back on so many of us."
After they disinvited the Sisters from their Pride celebration, the Dodgers were accused by queer activists of performative allyship—in other words behaving as allies without really believing in it. By inviting them back, the team cleaned up its image. They sold tickets. But the Sisters' "serious parody" of Catholicism, their decades of service, and their radical practice of love for the queer community was nonetheless obscured, not just by the media, but by the controversy itself and its apparent resolution. Making a radical group part of a corporate Pride celebration requires that the revolution be left at the door.
More importantly, perhaps, Pride has never represented the queer community as it exists and can't be expected to. You can't have a rebellion annually, much less one sponsored by a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Rethinking Pride for the twenty-first century means rethinking the usefulness and purpose of collective commemoration. We have the power to rewrite narratives handed down to us from our Stonewall elders, just as gay liberationists rewrote those passed down to them by homophile activists. Contemporary trans people continue to rewrite narratives imposed on them by the gay liberationists who co-opted their struggle.
History is a constant process of rewriting and reinvention. As we grapple with Pride, present and future, I challenge you to look beyond the month's cavalcade of rainbows and corporate virtue signaling to ask: what does it really mean to be in community with queer people this month and every month? What does it mean to fight oppression as it exists today? How can you show up, not just as someone who is "proud" to be queer (or supportive of queer people), but as someone committed to liberation?
After all, the people who fought at Stonewall didn't want to be invited to a baseball game—they wanted to be free, safe, healthy, fed, housed, protected, and loved. That takes a hell of a lot more than a parade.
What I’m doing when you’re not looking:
I had the chance to review two great books about the right wing’s corrupt anti-elite agenda: “The Right’s Campus Culture War Machine: How conservatives built a formidable network for ginning up scandal in higher education,” The New Republic (June 28, 2023)
Short takes:
News flash: former Trump advisor Steven Miller is an even bigger pr!ck than you think he is. Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin writes that among the tactics Miller suggested to stem undocumented migrants from crossing into the United States was to blow them up. That’s right! In 2018, the guy who was responsible for stealing migrant children and giving them away to Christian families “advocated using US predator drones in 2018 to blow up migrant boats full of unarmed civilians.” According to administration Deep Throat Miles Taylor’s new book, Miller “argued for the potential mass killing of civilians by suggesting they were not protected under the US Constitution because they were in international waters.” (June 27, 2023)
In an interview with Politico’s Kelly Garrity, former New Jersey Governor, and current GOP Presidential candidate Chris Christie spoke to recent (and unsurprising) news: donations intended for Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign are being diverted into
a personal slush fundthe Save American PAC to pay the Former Guy’s legal bills. “He should take a pledge today to instruct his campaign to no longer spend any public money on his legal fees,” Christie said about the estimated $1.5 million already spent. “He is the richest candidate in this race, yet he is using public money to pay his legal fees. He should be ashamed of himself.” (June 27, 2023)The American Historical Association has sent a letter to the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, asking the institution to reconsider renting space to Moms of Liberty, the right-wing women’s group that is behind book bans and censorship campaigns in public schools around the nation. The controversial organization holds its annual conference in Philadelphia this week. “The AHA would not be making this request if it was only a matter of disagreement over content or interpretation,” writes Executive Director James Grossman. “Moms for Liberty has every right to argue for an approach to history education with which we disagree. However, Moms for Liberty has crossed a boundary in its attempts to silence and harass teachers rather than participate in legitimate controversy. Moms for Liberty promotes legislation that censors honest and accurate history teaching and even threatens teachers with termination for no offense other than teaching history with professional integrity.” (June 26, 2023)
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This is great. Thank you, Hannah!
Excellent! So good to have a young person write like this. Thanks Hannah and Claire.