Category Archives: Right Wingers

Jesse’s Journal: Stonewall at 40

As an event and as a symbol, the Stonewall Riots of June 27-29 1969 continues to shape our lives.  Forty years later, a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender generation that was not even born in 1969 looks back fondly at “the Stonewall girls” as role models for GLBT activism and resistance. Even so, there are many young people today who do not know what “Stonewall” was, or what is represents, or why so many of our institutions and organizations are named after it.
 
Stonewall_pioneers When “Stonewall” took place, I lived in Miami. I was sixteen years old, in high school and uncertain about my future. It wasn’t until I graduated from high school in 1972 that I learned about the events that shook Greenwich Village three years before.  By then the event that Martin Duberman (in his 1993 study Stonewall) called “the emblematic event in modern lesbian and gay history,” had already become a symbol of pride and resistance. The late Donn Teal, whose Gay Militants (1971) included the best account of the Riots prior to the one in David Carter’s Stonewall (2004), wrote that Stonewall “jolted awake . . . an only half-remembered outrage against straight society’s bigotries in those older, generally conservative ‘Boys in the Band’ who had been out of town on the weekend of the 27th-28th-29th, tanning their thighs at Cherry Grove and the Hamptons. And, as a slur, it posed a challenge to and goal for those younger . . . gays who’d had to make do with Greenwich Village and who’d seen [the] action.  It may have created the gay liberation movement.”
 
Though Stonewall inspired a generation of young New Yorkers (and others), its effect on the rest of us was more symbolic than real. After all, Stonewall was not the beginning of queer liberation. The Riots came after almost two decades of Mattachine Society and ONE and Daughters of Bilitis and Tangents and Janus Society and Society for Individual Rights and West Side Discussion Group; of demonstrations in Philadelphia and  Washington, D.C.; and of riots in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere. It was the much-maligned Mattachine Society that got New York City to repeal its law against serving liquor to homosexuals in 1966, three years before Stonewall. (The NYPD continued to raid gay bars after the Riots, as it continues to do so today, though not because of the bar patrons’ sexual orientation.) Historian John Loughery was right when, in The Other Side of Silence, he pointed out that Stonewall was only the climax of a “maelstrom” year of gay resistance and activism.
 
New York City is the capital of America’s communications industry, and anything that happens there gets blown out of proportion. Though the New York media — especially the Village Voice, which had an office down the street from the Stonewall Inn – covered the Riots in their own unique ways, out of town papers largely ignored the event. And I was not the only gay person who lived through 1969 in blissful ignorance of Stonewall.  In fact, most gays at the time were not aware of the Riots till they became a symbol. For most lesbians, Stonewall made less of an impact on their lives than the feminist movement, then in its heyday. To this day there is still doubt as to what role lesbians played in the Stonewall Riots, or even if there were lesbians at the Stonewall Inn.
 
 
StoneWallInnLike any symbolic event, the truth about Stonewall lies hidden in myth and legend. To this day, the Uprising has been attributed to a variety of causes, from the full moon to Judy Garland’s death (her funeral was on the morning before the Riots). Even the names and number of Rioters are in dispute: for example, the transgender activist Sylvia Rivera, who played a mayor role in Duberman’s Stonewall, is absent from Carter’s Stonewall. None of the Rioters – Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Jackie Hormona, Zazu Nova or Jim Fouratt, just to name a few – achieved the mythic status given Diego Viñales, the Argentine student who was impaled on a fence while trying to escape the cops in the aftermath of a police raid on the Snake Pit, another Village bar (March 8, 1970). The Stonewall Riots were largely a group effort; and history has kept it that way.
 
Having said all that, one must give Stonewall credit where credit is due. Taking place in 1969, Stonewall was the culmination of a decade of political activism and resistance. Some Rioters were veterans of the 60s counterculture and/or the civil rights, antiwar, feminist or youth movements, and used their experiences to help create a new, more radical gay liberation movement. New York activists, living at the hub of American business and culture, used their privileged positions to launch a national movement.  For much of the seventies — until the rise of Harvey Milk, himself a New Yorker who moved to San Francisco — New York activists led most of the groups that we joined (or its local chapters) and published most of the books that we read.
 
All in all, the Stonewall Riot’s greatest achievement was their impact on the hearts and minds of several generations of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Though many heterosexuals remained firmly antigay, most of us who are G, L, B or T learned to accept and celebrate who we are. Thus it is significant that the anniversary of Stonewall has become the date of most annual GLBT Pride celebrations, not only in New York City but around the world. The late poet Allen Ginsberg, one of the fathers of our movement, saw the significance of Stonewall when he visited the site of the Riots soon after the first night: “Gay power!  Isn’t that great! . . . We’re one of the largest minorities in the country – 10 per cent, you know.  It’s about time we did something to assert ourselves.”
 
 
Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and gay activist who lives in South Florida with his life partner.  Write him at jessemonteagudo@aol.com.

It’s none of your business!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cI0955I5wXI

…and furthermore…if the churches continue to actively lobby against these particular legislations and participate in the electoral process by taking sides, we need to demand that their nonprofit status be TAKEN AWAY! They have a right to their opinion…but they don't have a right to my tax dollars to promote it.

Dissent

Marriage Lest the news of Proposition 8 be the ultimate buzz kill for today (which it sort of is), it's worth reading the opinion from California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno, who was the only judge dissenting in today's 6-1 decision upholding Proposition 8. Moreno, who was actually rumored to be on Obama's shortlist for the open Supreme Court vacancy that this morning went to Sonia Sotomayor, had this to say:

 

In my view, the aim of Proposition 8 and all similar initiative measures that seek to alter the California Constitution to deny a fundamental right to a group that has historically been subject to discrimination on the basis of a suspect classification, violates the essence of the equal protection clause of the California Constitution and fundamentally alters its scope and meaning.  Such a change cannot be accomplished through the initiative process by a simple amendment to our Constitution enacted by a bare majority of the voters; it must be accomplished, if at all, by a constitutional revision to modify the equal protection clause to protect some, rather than all, similarly situated persons.  I would therefore hold that Proposition 8 is not a lawful amendment of the California Constitution.

It's nice to know that at least one Judge has his wits about him.

Proposition 8 contradicts California's equal protection clause.

News Flash: Gay Priest! …oh…nevermind.

Weakland It comes as no big surprise to hear of the memoirs of Archbishop Rembert Weakland, former Catholic prelate of Milwaukee, and his admission therein that he is a gay man. Imagine that?! A gay priest.

What a shock.

Meanwhile, down Miami way, Father Cutie (pronounced "cue-tee-ay" no matter howFather Cutie cute he is) allows as how he's fallen in love with a woman, and "doesn't want to become the poster boy for anti-celibacy." Don't worry cutey. You won't.

We return once again, to the anti-sex of yesteryear…somewhere around the 16th century, when the Roman Catholic Church was worried about what was going to happen to all that real estate. Suddenly scriptural support for the celibacy of the priesthood was discovered….how conveeeeeeeeeeenient. Presto! No real estate problems. All the deeds stay with the church.

What is it that makes celibacy so desirable in a priest or a nun? Why is a lack of human, physical intimacy a recommend for spiritual superiority? 

Once again the Roman Catholic Church's wisdom in the area of sexuality and human intimacy is reminiscent of the Roman Catholic Church's wisdom in the area of astronomy. 

Which is to say: zero.

Space-06

Free Speech

I think
as I please


And this gives me pleasure.


My conscience decrees,


This right I must treasure.


My thoughts will not cater


To duke or dictator,


No man can deny —


Die gedanken sind frei.

— German 16th-century peasant
song (revived as a protest anthem against the Nazi regime)*

As emotionally satisfying as it is to hear that the British Home Secretary has banned San Francisco radio shock jock Michael Savage (ne Michael A. Weiner) and the despicable Fred Phelps and his family from entry into Great Britain, along with various and sundry mad Muslim imams, Egyptian clerics and Russian skinheads…it is, alas, the most wrong-headed ham-fisted response, to say nothing of an appalling lack of imagination.

Soapbox Simply put: the proper answer to abuse of free speech is not the stifling of speech, but rather more speech.

That is to say: Let idiots be heard. Let their rantings be viewed in the cleansing light of day. Ugly speech, like cockroaches, can't take the exposure to light.

Are we really so afraid of one another that we must repudiate our own values in the defence of those same values? Are we so afraid that they will gain greater audiences that reason will be lost (Japanese internment camps, the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Defense of Marriage radicals notwithstanding)? 

The time to defend core values, essential rights is not when it's easy, but when it's difficult.

The world has been presented with a teaching moment in which the
argument for free thought — that die gedanken sind frei ("thoughts are
free") that the Nazis and every other absolutist dictatorship have
excelled in crushing — has not been advanced by those who know better. The easy way out is not the answer. It's convenient to simply stifle ugly speech, but it also serves to elevate its standing.

As a result,
a world sorely in need of a crash course in the efficacy of free debate
received nothing of theMuzzling (1)  sort from the British Home Office. Instead, the lesson has been that the suppression
of ideas is valid, as long as the suppressors are convinced and self-assured that they are "more moral," of "higher character" and in
the right.

As usual, it helps to remember Mark Twain: "Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.

And you also have to think, when will my speech be deemed "offensive"? 

When will they come for me?

* with thanks to Robert Scheer

Charlatans of Intolerance

A week back the New York Times Magazine profiled the disturbingly (proudly) intolerant Evangelical Fundamentalists from Africa who have moved their "ministries" to the United States.  Worth a read.  But more worth a read is this Letter to the Editors:

Daniel Ajayi-Adeniran and Raphael Adebayo claim that the Redeemed are in America because it “has fallen into the thrall of wickedness.” If America is considered fallen, what does that say about the extreme poverty, disease, ethnic cleansing, tribal warfare and failed states of Africa where he and the Redeemed originated? In truth, the Redeemed came to America because this is where the money is, and because American freedoms allow all religions — even the most bizarre — not only to exist but to sustain their existence by exemption from taxes.

We chastised the leaders of the American automobile industry for flying to Washington on private jets, yet we subsidize by tax relief the purchase of a private jet for a religious group that prays for God to cancel debts supernaturally; believes text messages offer divine protection; prays for deliverance from curses, spells and sorcery, witchcraft, evil spirits, poverty and addiction due to demonic possession; petitions God to transform their followers into millionaires; and claims to perform miracles, see the future, raise the dead, avoid traffic jams, foresee coups, restore hair, cure kidney disease, depression and H.I.V.

How can we be so inconsistent?

STEPHEN T. MOSLEY
Newtown, Pa.

 

Indeed.