Today is the 27th June 2014. It is the eve of London Pride. But why do we celebrate annual LGBT events like Pride? Where does Pride come from? Today is not just the eve of London Pride, it is also the 45th anniversary of the night where a bar called The Stonewall Inn (a bar run by the mafia which was happy to serve LGBT people) in New York. The police had planned to raid the bar, not for the activity which was going on in the bar but for “non labelling of bottles of beer”. The police entered and words were exchanged between both the police and the clientele. The words at the time were found to be insulting for everyone; gay, faggot, poof, queer. People lost their lives in the scuffle that ensued. Men dressed as women were arrested including Martha P Johnson, a prolific drag queen in the New York scene and activist. Fires broke out in around the Stonewall Inn including the bar itself. All day Saturday, June 28, people came to stare at the burned and blackened Stonewall Inn. Graffiti appeared on the walls of the bar, declaring Drag power, They invaded our rights, Support gay power, and Legalize gay bars, along with accusations of police looting, and—regarding the status of the bar—We are open. But why does this lead to Pride? Why celebrate such a horrific event? If it wasn’t for solidarity for our gay family 45 years ago this night, Pride would never existed. The first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the New York community, after being devastated with events the year before gathered to remember those who lost their lives a year previous. It covered 51 blocks from the Christopher Street area in the Greenwich Village area of New York where the Stonewall Inn is located to Central Park. It took only 30 mins for the march to happen due to the excitement of the participants who remembered and carried banners and signs about what had happened and what they wanted to do to prevent this in future. The signs were about people’s own pride in who they were. They wanted to show they were not afraid anymore. The New York Times called this initial march, Gay Liberation Day. A year later in 1971, Gay Pride marches took place in Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee, Paris (France), West Berlin, Stockholm and London. The words used that night used to be words of insults, today, they signify words of empowerment. Some of the words used were gay (old meaning of being happy), tranny (to insult transvestites) which in the years before the transvestite community got tarred with the insult meant transistor radio, faggot, a derogatory word to insult gay men (in the uk, a word to describe minced spiced meat with some offal and onions wrapped in a pigs intestine). These are some of the words that were used to insult, they should now be empowering to everyone. Pride should be about remembering what happened that night, how different world and state communities came together to remember and NOT for a piss up. It should be about being happy and showing you are not afraid of who you are… gay, lesbian, bi, transgendered, straight supporter or someone who wants to be friendly towards the community. Today, Pride events seem to be more about drinking and getting drunk. Have we lost the real and true meaning behind what Pride is about? In places where in the world today have no gay rights, limited gay rights, persecuted due to being gay (in this paragraph, I use the word gay for the entire community), have sentences of death in some countries just for being gay, remember what happened in New York, on Christopher Street, in a bar which was raided and remember how far we have come due to the activists back then. We in the western world have been blessed with forward thinking governments, national and local LGBT groups and individuals who are still fighting for equality. Without their support, help and donations, local pride events would not happen. Take time out this Pride season to remember those back in 1969, in that small bar and look how far we have come. Remember that words are just that. Instead of seeing them as an insult, turn those words around that hurt and create them into words of empowerment. Without those forerunners in the past, our lives would be much less pleasant, would be a lot more hiding, a lot more beatings, a lot more discrimination.
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 17:52:05 +0000
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