Often when people talk about Gay Pride events, a question comes up: “Why do gay people get their own parade? Why can’t straight people have a Pride Parade?” Questions like this are often asked by dominant groups about non-dominant groups; it’s a derailing tactic used to erase the history of oppression that non-dominant groups have experienced. People ask the same questions about Black History Month, and International Women’s Day.
Still, the question remains: why? Why do LGBTQ people get their own special day (and, as you’ll remember from our last post, a whole official month)? If we take a hop in the Way-Back Machine (and if you know what that is, you probably don’t have to read this post), we’ll see why.
Picture yourself in the 1960s. A lot of people say they would love to live during that time--with Woodstock and hippies and the peace movement. It was a time of social upheaval, with the Civil Rights Movement in full swing and the counterculture resisting the mainstream culture of the time. The women’s rights movement was also pushing for equality. It was a great time to be alive--a time of intense change, when life for people was getting better.
Except if you were gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. At the end of the decade, homosexuality was illegal in 49 states, with Illinois being the only state without such laws. Almost all medical authorities agreed that homosexuality was a mental defect, and many classified same-sex relationships as “sociopathic relationships”. It was thought that this ‘mental illness’ developed in the first three years of life, and if you were out, therapy for such an illness consisted of, according to one survivor, psychiatrists trying to convince the patient that they weren’t gay, and if that didn’t work, they would then turn to “aversion therapy”, in which the patient was shown pornographic images of people of their same gender, and then were electrically shocked to ‘re-train’ their brains.
If such ‘therapies’ didn’t work, a gay person could be committed to a psychiatric institution, such as Atascadero State Hospital, which became known as the ‘Dachau for queers’. At Atascardero, gay patients were experimented on, and in one case given a drug to simulate drowning--essentially medicalized water boarding. In other institutions, gay men were often sterilized or castrated, and many were given lobotomies. These were the lives led by gay people who confessed their sexuality to their families.
Oppression didn’t just come from the medical field. It also came from law enforcement. LGBTQ people had zero protection under law, and if arrested for “lewd, immoral behavior”, had to face their names, ages and home addresses being published in the local newspapers. Such an arrest in some cases made it practically impossible to get a job or housing. Numerous arrests were made because people weren’t wearing the “right clothes”--according to activist Leslie Feinberg, one had to be wearing three or more garments assigned to the “correct” sex in Buffalo, NY, in order to avoid arrest--and these laws were simply a few that openly discriminated against the gender-variant. Many who lived during the time explained that being out wasn’t an option, for obvious reasons, and those who were out faced harassment from almost every avenue of life.
The openly gay were often homeless and unemployed youth who were kicked out of their homes from their families--kids around high school age and a little older. The center of their communities were gay bars, but even here they weren’t safe. Police raided bars frequently, demanding IDs and making arrests. Anyone who resisted was often met with violence--this on top of violence from outside law enforcement. In some cases, beatings of gay, lesbian and trans people ended in memory loss or paralysis; in still more cases, the victims were murdered.
It seems almost unimaginable, to think about the way LGBTQ people were treated by other citizens, by doctors and by the police. And because of the nature of the attacks made on them, gay people had very little political voice. No one was willing to stand up for them, and perhaps most importantly, most of them weren’t standing up for themselves. Although many people who were at the Stonewall uprising were involved in the civil rights movement, they didn’t yet have the community to organize any formal protests. That would change after a series of riots in New York City in June 1969.
So when people ask the question why do gay people need Pride Parades? It’s because of the oppression they suffered at the hands of their families, their communities, medical professionals and the law. It’s because before the Stonewall riots, the lives of LGBTQ people were threatened every single day, just because of their sexuality. Gay marriage was generally not on these people’s minds--they just wanted protection from police brutality and the threat of murder.
No comments:
Post a Comment