LGBT people are not safe in America, and we didn’t need the shooting in Orlando to remind us.
We are consistently the demographic most targeted for hate crimes in the US. Members of our community have had a war declared on their rights to use a restroom, and we face homelessness at a disproportionate rate.
And as we approach the last Sunday in June, the weekend that commemorates the 1969 Stonewall riots, credited as the beginning of the national LGBT fight for equality, we must not only pay homage to this historical moment. We should consider replicating it.
The Stonewall riots were an actual melee between “us” and the police, not a parade, and it was led by sex workers, trans folks and gay people of color, those still fighting for humane treatment in our society.
It went on for days, and in its wake people became more organized at a larger scale. By the following year, the movement had stretched to major cities across the nation. The pride parade that we have today – which, in New York’s version, ends at the Stonewall Inn – began as a public protest that happened nationally each year to remind the world that we are here.
LGBT people shut down highways, they took to the streets, they held die-ins at religious institutions, they chained themselves to the White House fence; they were radical in their fight to be alive.
This radical action of demanding to be seen – by coming together to march, to riot, to fight to demand freedom – succeeded. And it can succeed again.
Many of us didn’t grow up during the original Stonewall moment, or even during the Aids epidemic, where similar grassroots activism led to reform, but we still have a salient modern example of a movement rising up and demanding their voices be heard: the Black Lives Matter movement to end police violence.
Many leaders of BLM are also members of the LGBT community – Deray McKesson is gay, and the three women who started #BlackLivesMatter are all queer. Those of us who exist at the intersection of marginalized sexuality and race now have a storied tradition of fighting for space in the world. Because these communities still face disproportionate violence daily, some four decades after the gay rights movement came to be.
While we’ve had some victories – we can marry and serve openly in the armed forces because we are “just like you” – there’s no getting around the fact that the largest mass shooting in US history was aimed at LGBT Latinos. And transgender women are still murdered at a rate of almost one every two weeks, and HIV rates are again growing within queer youth populations.
So our fight for freedom, and to stay alive, is not done.
As we still continue to mourn the shooting in Orlando, we must help make our Pride celebrations more like they once were. We shouldn’t stand on the streets of our major cities this weekend and cheer complacently as corporate floats drive by and rainbow flags wave. We must demand change, and we must demand action everyday on every street, because we are not yet free.
We must do the work to show the world that we are more than marriage, and we are even more than the fight against gun violence we are being urged to join in the wake of Orlando. Our lives matter, and we will keep fighting for them as long as needed.
