The cancellation of this year’s “Pride Parade” has given non-“A List” LGBTQs the opportunity to replace that vapid, corporation-drenched spectacle with a truly community-driven event that recalls the best traditions of the Stonewall Rebellion which rebirthed our movement.
Rather than a parade, with most people passively viewing from the sidelines, we will have a participatory MARCH which centers Black and Brown voices. Trans voices, so often shunted to the side, will be prominent.
We will unapologetically highlight issues of racism, police violence, and the obscene amount of money spent on a militarized police, and a military which polices the world. In so doing, we will be honoring the rich, but largely forgotten history of the Stonewall Rebellion and the movement that followed it.
Not only was Stonewall a rebellion against police violence, fighting racism was also a core principle of the movement that came immediately after it. Our early LGBTQ movement organized many actions against racism and police violence in solidarity with the Black Panther Party, leading the BPP to become the first large “non-LGBTQ” organization to embrace what at the time was called “gay liberation.”
Like today’s #blacklivesmatter movement with its demand to defund the police, our early, post-Stonewall movement recognized that resources spent on repression deprived communities of needed resources. As such and in solidarity with peoples abroad, our movement organized into chapters known as the Gay Liberation Front, named after the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. GLF proudly organized in the anti-war movement of that era.
The Stonewall movement also helped radicalize the women’s movement of its time, challenging its entrenched homophobia and respectability politics, thus helping win legalized abortion in 1973.
Now that the corporate Pride Parade has been canceled, please join us on Sunday, June 28th to Reclaim Pride with a true people’s march in the best tradition of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. We will meet at 12 noon at the “Belmont” Red Line for a short opening rally and then MARCH to Reclaim Pride!
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CONFUSION ABOUT MULTIPLE PRIDE EVENTS? Just to be clear, this event is a merged one with another group, Pride Without Prejudice (https://www.facebook.com/events/552252045434223/), to have one united, anti-racist radical Pride march!
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This event is a serious demand for change, and a commemoration of those who fought before us, not a party.
Out of respect for your fellow community members and to protect everyone’s safety, please wear a mask, social distance as best you can, and do not bring alcohol or other drugs. Thank you!