#NotOurStonewall

[adrotate banner="16"]

[feather_share show="twitter, google_plus, facebook, reddit, tumblr" hide="pinterest, linkedin, mail"]

By: Alex Wilson

The Stonewall Riots are such a significant part of my culture as a Queer person. They provided me with hope and resilience as I was learning how to navigate the heteronormative world we live in. They also gave me Pride, although a very different one from what we see celebrated today.

So you would think, when I heard a movie focusing on the events of Stonewall was coming out this September, I would be ecstatic. I mean really, the Gay and Lesbian section on Netflix is barren. But instead of excitement while watching the trailer I felt infuriated, disgusted, hurt and appalled.

The riots began in response to a particularly brutal police raid on June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York. Rioting and civil disobedience continued through the following nights and a Christopher Street Liberation march was mobilized shortly after. These riots fundamentally changed Queer activism. They started new radical Queer rights organizations like the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activists Alliance as well as the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and launched the modern Queer Rights movement. They also started a culture of Pride in the Queer community, as for the first time people were fighting back en-masse against systemic oppression. This activism was in stark contrast to the assimilative tactics being used before that night.

Stonewall embodied intersectionality. The patrons of the bar were predominantly trans folk, drag queens, self-proclaimed dykes, sex workers, queer runaways, and people of colour. All of these people faced multiple barriers of systemic oppression and Stonewall acted as a space for them to congregate and be themselves. To say that they were only rebelling against Queer oppression would be dangerously false. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a lifelong trans-activist and patron of the bar that night, provided insight into the level of marginalization these folks faced when she told her account of the night.

“When you get in those kind of situations, the first thing you want to do is piss off whatever guard you’re fighting so much that they knock you completely out, then you’ll live another day. They won’t keep beating on you until you don’t live.” The leaders and primary instigators of the rebellion that night were almost all dykes, transwomen or drag queens of colour, that all experienced this degree of marginalization. Yet the film has whitewashed the story and replaced key female roles with those of males to the extent that the protagonist has been made a white-cis-gay male.

Stonewall grounds me in my radicalism, but it also reminds me how privileged I am and how divided the current Queer movement is. We face systemic marginalization and oppression. Granted, this will vary based on the intersection of our identities, but in this way we are different from the hetero-cisnormative culture around us. Stonewall empowers me. Stonewall has helped me be proud of who I am. But, Stonewall has been co-opted by this movie.

The reason behind the blatant transphobia and racism in this movie is what I find particularly offensive. Lesbians, transwomen and sex workers of colour: none of these identities make as compelling of an American Dream narrative as a white cis country boy. This movie is not only contributing to the continued oppression of these groups, but it is erasing them and their role in Queer history. Ignore the fact that without the incredible courage of the people at Stonewall that night Queer history might not even exist.

One of the most troubling aspects of this predicament is that it can easily be put into the larger context of division in the Queer community today. While 2015 especially has been an incredible year for Queer rights, not all Queer folk have been benefiting equally from these strides. Transwomen of colour still face disproportionately high levels of violence—18 transwomen have been murdered in the United States so far this year.

It is the responsibility of more privileged identities in the Queer community to continue to fight. Our movement is founded in the work of transwomen, sex workers and drag queens of colour, and we cannot forget or remove them from it. Stonewall erases these voices in order to commodify this turning point in Queer history. It is appalling and it is certainly not my Stonewall.

[feather_share show="twitter, google_plus, facebook, reddit, tumblr" hide="pinterest, linkedin, mail"]

[adrotate banner="12"]