The following is republished from the author’s site.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell anyone it’s Pride Month. It’s been advertised everywhere from Google to Twitter. A coming out party for the wholesale corporate appropriation of an underground movement. It’s not even Queer Pride Month anymore, that title has become too politically incorrect, it might make the straight world uneasy. It’s LGBTQ Pride Month, that Disneyfied assimilationist alphabet soup cooked up to get the breeders comfortable enough to bother curing AIDS.
Not that I have anything against Pride Month, quite the contrary, I’m very proud to be a genderfuck lesbian. I’m just apoplectic over the fact that I finally came out just in time for my community to sell out. If you were to go on the advertisements and fanfare alone you’d think we were celebrating the day that drone strike sociopath Barack Obama granted us the right to government sanctioned monogamy. The liberal establishment who suddenly loves us so goddamn much always seems to fail to mention that Queer Pride Month was originally launched to commemorate a violent uprising against the very state they hold so near and dear.
June became Pride Month in celebration of the Stonewall Uprisings of late June, 1969. After the NYPD launched another violent raid against another underground gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, the T-girls and gay boys decided they weren’t in the mood to get bashed again by a bunch of bribe taking, sexually confused, neckless, cretins with badges. June 28, 1969 was the day the fags bashed back. And they bashed hard. These weren’t today’s garden variety house queers either. This mob was a beautiful patchwork of the colors of the queer rainbow that have been erased by the LGBTQ establishment in favor of marketability. These were the drag queens, unpassable trans women, Radical Faeries, and flannel bound bulldykes, my people. We took on the state and we fucking won. We literally kicked the ass of the meanest police force in the country, digging our nails into their thick necks and cracking their jar-heads wide open with bricks. By the time we were finished with our enemies in blue they were running for their lives from the queer volcano they ignited.
This was the birth of the Queer Liberation Movement. Within weeks a score of revolutionary organizations were hatched across the Five Boroughs and eventually the country. Influenced by fellow anti-colonialist urban guerrilla movements like the Black Panthers and the Latin Kings, they weren’t asking for reform, they were demanding revolution and they were declaring war against the state that oppressed them. This is precisely what the mainstream left and their assimilationist quislings are trying to pink wash with their politically castrated Pride Month and the tragically defanged LGBTQ movement. Queer liberation has always been an inherently anti-statist movement and contrary to popular belief our fight is far from fucking over.
To paraphrase the late Che Guevara, we need to create two, three, many Stonewalls. We need to create a Stonewall in every red light district being gentrified by corporate “family” fascists. We need to create a Stonewall in every prison where trans people are cruelly quarantined into isolation for their own protection when it’s the guards who are the real threat. We need to create a Stonewall in every public school where children are segregated and deprived based solely on the contents of their genitalia. We need to create a Stonewall in every clinic that denies people basic services for not conforming to the gender on their birth certificates. We need to create a Stonewall in every tax-exempt church that still advocates abuse against their children, our children. We need to create a Stonewall in every federal agency that victimizes our people for crossing the border or trying to make a goddamn living with their own bodies. We need to create a Stonewall at the headquarters of every pharmaceutical lobby that takes our tax dollars through corporate welfare and jacks up the cost of hormones sky high to a level that only a pampered bitch like Caitlyn Jenner could afford.
And we need to create one great big queer fucking Stonewall uprising in Washington D.C. where a fascist empire presides over its unwilling subjects across the globe with all the mercy of the Marquis De Sade. Where the pitiless war machine orders drones and bombs and bullets to murder our brothers and sisters and everything in between with endless wars and homophobic puppet regimes. We need a million Stonewalls, dearest motherfuckers. And we need to keep that fire burning until we chase every pig out of town.
