Happy Anniversary!

What anniversary you ask?

Why it is the anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, it was on this day back in 1969 that the rebellion took place (Ops... I was one day early). It was on this day that the LGBT people in New York stood up and said enough.

Each year the memory gets fainter and each year the history gets rewritten a little more.

A couple of years ago I was at a Pride event down in the southwestern part of the state and they had posters about Stonewall and each poster was about a lesbian or gay person who took part in Stonewall. When I asked a young gay man with a pride volunteer T-shirt why there were no posters of trans-people hanging up, his answer was, “Well they weren’t any.” So I went over to one of the organizers and asked him, he sheepishly said that he looked but he couldn’t find any.

We keep getting written out of history, people say that Stonewall was the beginning of the “Gay Rights Movement” but what it really it was the beginning of the “LGBT Rights Movement.” When you question them on that they usually say… Oh, I meant Gay as in LGBT. So we get all lumped together under “Gay” but the problem is that people think of gay as gay not LGBT.

So let’s go back to the source to September 1970, one year and three months later. the Transadvocate has a letter-to-the-editor in the Advocate in response to another letter-to-the-editor that was complaining about the “drag queens” in the Pride parade…

Also, he should remember that the homophile community ranges from flamboyant drag queens to conservative closet queers—but we are all human and should join together in this our common struggle. Please don’t forget that it was the DRAG QUEENS who fought back last year, not we closet queens.

In the first letter-to-the-editor the writer said,

How can we make demands for equality, based on our rights as normal citizens, when our public image is constantly destroyed by flamboyancy and poor taste.

I, as much as anyone else, really enjoy a campy good time, but a public demonstration is not really the place for dropping beads and “in” jokes.

Where were the “normal looking fags,” the college types and so on, whose appearance would bolster our image?

And that is why we were written out of the history of Stonewall because they only wanted the ‘’’normal looking fags,’ the college types and so on, whose appearance would bolster our image” and to this day there are some lesbians and gays who wish that we would just go away.