Pride is a Riot

 

There have been some pieces of good news to report this month, like the court's rejection of the Tennessee drag ban, and the utter rebuke of the Florida denial of trans treatment. But this year has faced extraordinary challenges to the trans community, and often using the same tired tropes as have always been used against the gay community--recruitment because "they"* can't reproduce, focused on the youth, etc. The bigots still insist on their supposed right to bigotry to deny the actual rights of marginalized people to be and feel free in public. 

That's why Pride as a riot and a protest is still ongoing. Because contention over whether gay rights and human dignity can be publicly admitted results in scenes like this:

Anti-LGBT protestors attack Pro-LGBT demonstrators outside of a Glendale, CA schoolboard meeting.

The schoolboard is voting on recognizing June as Pride month. pic.twitter.com/T1zqZMTn7D

— Brennan Murphy (@brenonade) June 7, 2023

It doesn't hurt anyone for kids to know LGBTQ people exist, that they have rights, that they are not, despite radical right-wing ideology, weirdo sex fiends but are just people. And it serves the dual purpose of ensuring that marginalized and targeted gay and trans children are understood and not victimized in their schools. We've been telling these kids since a dozen years ago "it gets better" and the trolling haters kept hating. The fight doesn't end. (And the LGB without the T jackasses in the sainted names of Marsha Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and Brandon Teena can fuck off the planet. Or better yet, learn history.) 

Be allies not shall-I's.  Bonds, bunks, mutual aid and speaking up accepted everywhere anti-LGBTQ lies are being pushed,

* Right handed people give birth to left handed babies. I never understand the "LGBT people don't reproduce" thing. Of course, the bits work. The glowing and enormous pictures of transmen enjoying their pregnancies exist. IVF exists. How can this dumb trope still exist? And don't get me started on the "rounded up and put on a deserted island" thing. Um, everyone would be too busy looking for a way off Stunad Island to worry about making a new generation of coconut eaters, thanks...

They *Do* Want Us Dead

 

Hours after a mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, LibsOfTikTok is targeting another LGBTQ organization in Colorado Springs.

They want to get people killed. That’s really the only explanation here. This is textbook stochastic terrorism. pic.twitter.com/l793uiMQpm

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) November 20, 2022

The LibsofTikTok account is live at Twitter under the new Regime. I hate it. I want you to understand something about this weird little targeting site--they want LGBT people dead, and their allies. Yes, even their allies. I know this because they targeted a whole Children's Hospital.  For a weird lie about what pediatric trans care entails--no one is performing surgeries on minors.  And that hospital is still receiving bomb threats, even now.  Because, I guess, like they say, a lie can travel the world before the truth has a chance to put on its pants. 

But think on it--this is a hospital for all kinds of sick children. Every patient, employee and family member has now been targeted for the supposed transgressions of a very, very few. Because they want allies to be severed. They want people to give up accepting LGBT lives in public, at all. 

One of the heroes of the mass shooting was a dad. He was an ally--a straight family man who was just there to appreciate a show. The violence is directed at telling people to fear LGBT spaces. To say if you are an ally--don't be there. Your friends belong in a closet. They shouldn't be seen and their books shouldn't be read. Be afraid.

I don't think it works that way. Mr. Fiero and a drag queen * (CORRECTION--new reports say she was a trans woman,) beat the shooter senseless, and that was more than the hundreds of police at Uvalde did when there was a mass shooter there. Let's face it, drag queens were the front line at Stonewall and are gonna be all up in haters' faces until the haters serve surrender. (And vis the correction--yes, trans women, too.)

But in the meanwhile, LGBT haters are still targeting trans athletes, trans treatment, and drag anything at all. 

"Free" Florida and "Don't Say Gay"

 

I don't talk a lot about the identity I simultaneously have and don't express. I'm queer. I'm a straight-married bi woman. I don't have a lot of experience as a queer person because I'm basically massively introverted and if you're a stacked femme-presenting female, dudes ask after you and that's easy enough. But I don't read as straight out in the world exactly, either, and I'm pissed about the idea that people need to be shoved back in the closet. Which is what Florida's "Don't say Gay" is about. 

"Don't ask, don't tell" was discontinued in the US military in 2011. I was a bi person in college when this was initiated in the US military in 1993, and was somehow the enlightened option. This was after the ACT-up/Queer Nation demonstrations regarding AIDS and the decision of GOP administrations (Reagan and Bush) that queer people had no lives that straight (Christian) people were bound to respect. 

It did start/it did not start, with Stonewall--it doesn't end there.

The point is the conversation--do we all have rights, or not? Do we all breathe the same air? Do we all have the right to live and love(end DOMA)? Fight for our rights--even in the military (end DADT!) It's kind of b.s. to point to one moment in the '60's as where a movement starts--how "Boomer-centric!" It's easy to point out that there isn't so much a movement, as disparate homosexual voices, realizing silence isn't an option. It's easy--and it's hard. The broader culture is still pretty hetero-normative. But acceptance is growing. Even if it sometimes feels like....


We're up against a stone wall?


No, just up against people who don't know and need to be told. There is a history, and that is why there is Pride. "Pride" is about still being here, until just being here isn't a thing anyone needs to be proud about anymore: it's just a thing that "is."