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I am not Stonewall
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. What if the reasons I came out as gay have nothing to do with Stonewall? What if Stonewall was just one of scores of independently-arising acts of resistance that occurred spontaneously throughout my childhood? It's a curious thing, history, how we create these stories about critical events shaping our world -- few people step back to ask, if that specific event hadn't happened, wouldn't we still have shaped our world pretty much the same way? Would we have gone to war against Japan without a Pearl Harbor? Invaded Iraq without a 9/11? Elected Trump without a Comey letter? Maybe "yes" to all three. ----- Would we never have a gay rights movement without Stonewall, would we all still be in the closet today? ----- I started getting crushes on other boys, that's why I came out. Not because some street kids beat up some police officers in NYC when I was one year old. The Stonewall riots have become the gay equivalent of a parable told about Jesus. Our loaves and fishes moment. Enough gay pride to feed the planet, with seven baskets left over. I'm not criticising what the Stonewall riots were, I'm only asking you to think about how such stories become our cultural myths. The moments we select for our icons. How we turn an event into a monument, while ignoring similar events and other interpretations of our past.
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