Stonewall at 40: State of the Movement

I know progressive blogs are flooded with Stonewall anniversary coverage, retrospectives, and musings, but I can't bring myself to post today about anything else. Here's what I've been reading this Stonewall weekend:

New York Times applauds the audacity of the Stonewall rioters, concluding,

It’s a press cliché that “gay supporters” are disappointed with Obama, but we should all be. Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places.

The New Civil Rights Movement celebrates LGBTQ activists' participation in America's fine heritage of protest politics. The American Prospect urges us to stop apologizing for being who we are, stop waiting for our leaders to notice us, stop waiting for opportune moments, and refuse to stand down until our bodies, loves, and desires are truly free.

That fight, sadly, is barely begun: At 1 am on Sunday, police raided a gay bar in Fort Worth, TX. People were sent to the hospital for police-inflicted injuries. The story is not well covered by mainstream news, so spread the word. People need to know that this kind of thing is still happening.

To add insult to injury, the New York Times ran a cute little story called "I Love You, Man (as a Friend)," which looks like it's celebrating the fact that gay and straight men can (gasp!) be friends with each other, while actually sensationalizing the supposed divide between gay and straight people, reinforcing the assumption that gay and straight people are fundamentally different, suggesting that gay people are more valuable for their "social insights" than as human beings, and blaming gay people—instead of our bigoted society—for the fact that gay and straight men are afraid to be friends with each other. No mention of women's gay/straight friendships, of course.

In our fair capital city, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis had to send out a warning letter to her employees after someone defaced the Gay Pride Month posters hanging in the department's elevators. Really, guys?

Meanwhile, marriage has been legally equal in the Netherlands since 2001, so M. V. Lee Badgett went there and interviewed married gay couples to find out what it's like. His book, When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage, "compellingly shows that allowing gay couples to marry does not destroy the institution of marriage and that many gay couples do benefit, in expected as well as surprising ways, from the legal, social, and political rights that the institution offers." Well, what do you know. (Hat tip: Hunter of Justice.)

I'm a big believer in the power of gay marriage to legitimize LGBTQ people in the eyes of society, but this weekend I realized another big barrier to queer visibility. I didn't learn about the Stonewall riots in school, even though my American history classes covered other civil rights movements pretty well. So long as Stonewall and the LGBTQ rights movement is left out of our history books, LGBTQ civil rights and people are erased from our country's history. This year, let's celebrate Stonewall's 40th anniversary by reminding the people around us that queers have a place in history, that the fight for our civil rights is decades old—and far from over.