I am not Stonewall

[kanzeon_2040]

Nowadays LGBT folks ritualistically credit the Stonewall riots of June 1969 as the all-important kickoff for the LGBT liberation movement, as though the notion of gay rights hadn't existed before those two nights

Comments

[matrixmann]

If speaking about the US - perhaps you'd still live in the hiding.
That conservative, fundamentalistic and latent Nazi bunch that your culture is over there...

In terms of the rest of the world - I'd say no. Gay rights and gay rights movements would exist without the ongoings in the US. And those places they haven't been realized in, I think they would even get better forwards if the outward-oriented culture of "what gays are like" didn't exist. Because each place could come to its own way of how to treat it culturally and how to view it. Without creating a gizmo which shapes peoples' idea of "what it means to be gay" (on both sides, on the side of the gays as well as the heterosexuals) and makes the non-gay people feel repulsed because they see grown-up people behave more childish than children themselves could ever be

[ahunter3]

If there is a relevant history that hasn't been written about, and needs to be, it's the story of how things get *from* a person or two here and there and not particularly connected with each other, thinking that how they are regarded and treated is not normal and natural and can be and needs to be changed, *to* a movement that makes those changes happen.

Stonewall appears to be a sort of stand-in symbol for that transformation. But it doesn't provide the explanation. Not in any way that I've ever been told about. From the outside it makes no more coherent sense than the underwear-gnomes tale of inevitable profit. Definitely a step two (if not also three and four and five) missing.

1. Yet another unfair police bust results in a riot

2. ???

3. Culture-wide movement to shift perceptions and demand social change

[kanzeon_2040]

I think we all inspired each other as we each came out in our own ways, but we need an oral history of Coming Out in the pre-Internet age,

we weren't building upon an NYC queer riot, we were each facing our own lives and saying, fuck no, I'm not straight,

all by ourselves,