Pride parades will be taking place across the country this month. As we all rev up for this year’s festivities, so, too, will the fault lines of race, gender identity and class emerge.
In addition to the main Pride events taking place in many major cities and towns, there will be segments of our communities – from women to trans people to people of color – holding their own.
Pride is about the varied expressions of the life, gifts, and talents of the entire community. But the divisions in our communities during Pride also show us something troubling and broken within ourselves.
Last year a black queer resistance rose up – across the country and beyond – denouncing the glib notion that “gay is the new black.”
Philly’s Updated Pride Flag
For example, last year Philadelphia memorably had a controversy over its new Pride flag. Black and brown stripes were added to the rainbow flag as part of the city’s campaign “More Color More Pride, ” as a way of visibly include people of color. in the celebrations.
“It’s a push for people to start listening to people of color in our community, start hearing what they’re saying, and really to believe them and to step up and say, ‘What can I do to help eradicate these issues in our community?” said Amber Hikes, the new executive director of Philadelphia’s Office of LGBT Affairs told “NBC OUT.”
D.C.’s Segregation
The nation’s capitol is always a big draw for LGBTQ communities across the country during pride season, but D.C.’s white communities aren’t always inviting and welcoming – and last year many people of African descent spoke out about it.
“We don’t socialize together. There are very few places where black and white socialize together, which is the basis of relationships and friendships, the basis of understanding,” Earl Fowlkes told the Washington Blade.
Fowlkes is executive director of the Center for Black Equity, a national D.C.-based group that advocates for African-American LGBTQ people and helps organize Black Pride events in the U.S. and abroad.
“And until we start doing that and creating those spaces to do that we’re going to have misunderstandings and a lack of sensitivity toward issues of race.”
Boston Being Boston
Boston Black Pride 2017 took place in February, offering hip-hop yoga, commemorating Black History Month and National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness, and a Mix and Mingle Drag Paint Party, to name a few.
Sadly, the growing distance between our larger white LGBTQ community and LGBTQ communities of color is shown, for example, by how a health issue like HIV/AIDS, which was once an entire LGBTQ community problem, is now predominately impacting communities of color.
LGBTQ people of African descent have focused not only on HIV/AIDS and same-sex marriage but have also fought unemployment, housing, gang violence, and homelessness, to name a few.
Montreal’s Pride Parade Protest
Then there was Montreal — my go-to place when I want to flee both my home in Massachusetts and the entire United States — which had their troubles last year at Pride, too.
Organizers of Black Queer Lives Matter (BQLM) disrupted the minute of silence during the parade because of Pride’s whitewashing and complicity in the erasure of its Black and racialized origins during the Stonewall uprising of 1969.
This is part of BQLM’s statement at Montreal Pride:
Pride Montréal will have to answer for its decisions, its actions or its lack of actions before the LGBTQ Montreal racialized communities. Recognize that we have created Pride and give it back to us!
Marsha P Johnson
Stormé DeLarverie
Sylvia RiveraLet the names of these trans and queer women resonate in your heads and be visible in all editions of Pride! They are trans and from POC communities and are at the origin of the Pride movement!”
The growing distance between our larger and white LGBTQ community and LGBTQ communities of color has a historical antecedent as BQLM showed.
Many LGBTQ people of African descent and Latinos argue that the gulf between whites and people of color is also about how the dominant queer community rewrote – and continues to control – the history of Stonewall.
The Stonewall Riot started on the backs of working-class African-American and Latinx queers who patronized that bar. Those brown and black LGBTQ people are not only absent from the photos of that night, but they are also bleached from its written history.
With advances such as hate crime laws, legalization of same-sex marriage across the country, and with homophobia viewed as a national concern, the LGBTQ movement has come a long way since the first Pride march in 1969.
Many laud the distance the LGBTQ community has traveled in such a short time from a disenfranchised group on the fringe of America’s mainstream to a community now embraced. But not all members of our community have crossed the finish line.
Some are waving the cautionary finger that within our community not all are equal. And Pride events can be public displays of those disparities.
Cultural acceptance is just one of a few things LGBTQ people of color do not experience from larger Pride events. Many Pride celebrations are predominately white, and many LGBTQ of color revelers experience social exclusion and invisibility within these spaces.
After decades of Pride events where many LGBTQ people of color tried to be included and weren’t, black, Asian and Latino Pride events were born.
Fighting among ourselves
As we feud with one another our protections are being chipped away while we’re preoccupied.
Since Donald Trump has taken office, there has been an erosion of LGBTQ civil rights under the guise of religious liberty. There are bills are that are
Lawmakers want to use so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Acts to codify discrimination as a backlash to the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage. The laws could be used to deny LGBTQ people services on state and local levels – and Trump is in lockstep with these discriminatory practices.
Meanwhile, transgender Americans being denied access to public lavatories is eerily reminiscent of the country’s Jim Crow era, denying African-Americans access to lunch counters, water fountains, and, libraries, gas stations, theaters, and restrooms.
Then there are the laws passed in Kansas and Oklahoma that allow adoption agencies to refuse to place children in the homes of families they find morally reprehensible (also known as LGBTQ people).
So where do we go from here?
We have to recognize the need to network and build coalitions beyond our immediate communities, creating an intersectional social justice movement throughout the nation to foster healthy and wholesome communities.
While pride events are still fraught with divisions, at their core, pride events are an invitation for communities to connect their political activism with their celebratory acts of song and dance in its continued fight for justice.
They should highlight the multicultural aspect of joy and celebration that symbolizes not only our uniqueness as individuals and communities but also affirms our varied expressions of queer life in America.
