Stonewall To Campaign For Transgender Rights

Well, I guess I shouldn't be too hard on the Human Rights Campaign.  Turns out, they're not the only gay-headed organization that's been throwing trans people under the bus.  Nor are they the first to do so:  Jim Fouratt and his cohort seemed to take the first possible opportunity to kick Sylvia Rivera out of the Gay Liberation Front, which she helped them found in the days after the Stonewall Rebellion.  

Nor, for that matter, is the US the only country in which leaders of gay and lesbian organizations have ignored, or even openly disdained, transgender people.  Ironically, a British organization called Stonewall--yes, after that Stonewall---has excluded trans people since its founding in 1989. Now Ruth Hunt, its chief executive, has announced that the organization will change its policies and start campaigning for transgender rights.

To be fair, Stonewall--an organization devoted to charity and education--has always billed itself as an LGB organization.  Unlike HRC and other organizations in the US, it didn't hypocritically append a "T" to the other letters of the community it purported to serve.  In other words, it neither solicited from, nor claimed to represent, transgender people.  And, I might add, Stonewall wasn't a single-issue (i.e., same-sex marriage) organization that the HRC, in effect, became.

On another note:  Wouldn't Jim Fouratt and Janice Raymond make a lovely couple?

From Stonewall To Toronto: World Pride

This weekend, there will be Pride celebrations all over the world.

Here in New York, the Pride March always passes the Stonewall Inn, where patrons--including transgenders and drag queens--fought back against a police raid on a hot night forty-five years ago this Sunday.

I marched last year, and on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion--just a few days before my surgery.

Three years after the Rebellion, Toronto witnessed its first Pride event.  For years after that, the police continued to raid bathouses and the city denied organizers permissin to march down Yonge Street.   Every mayor beginning with Barbara Hall in 1995--and ending with, ahem, current mayor Rob Ford three years ago--has attended the march, though it wasn't officially recognized by the municipal government until 1998.

This year, Toronto is hosting World Pride.  

A few days ago, the Huffington Post ran a fine article and even better selection of photos from the 1974 event.  It's worth looking at for the hairstyles, cars, bikes and clothes. In other words, even if you don't care about LGBT history, it's a history lesson or time capsule, depending on how old you are.

Check out the photo near the end in which a young bespectacled lesbian is sitting on the front steps of what appears to be City Hall.  Check out her lace-up, open-back clogs:  Can you get any more '70's than that?  (I wore a pair when I was in college!)

By The Time We Got To Stonewall

You've all heard "Woodstock" by Crosby Stills Nash & Young.  If you haven't, you have 43 years of catching-up to do.

I'll bet that unless you're one of her fans, you probably didn't know that Joni Mitchell actually wrote the song.  She was going to perform it, but wasn't able to go to the festival.  So CSNY--who were performing only for the second time as a group--did it.

But I digress.  I was thinking about that song--and about Melanie's "Lay Down" when I took this photo with my cell phone:

Yes, I was in NYC Pride.  I marched with the Anti-Violence Project (and wore one of those T-shirts).  Near the end of the march, we passed the Stonewall Inn, where the events that made Pride possible took place on a hot early summer night in 1969.

It's the first time in four years--and since my surgery--that I've marched.  I normally don't care much for parades--as a marcher or spectator--but I make an exception for Pride.  And marching with the Anti-Violence Project was right for me:  I've been volunteering with them, and they (especially one counselor, "Miss Vicki" Cruz), have helped me to deal with the aftermath of a relationship.

After marching with AVP, I walked over to St. Luke In The Fields--only steps from the end of the march--for a picnic and Evensong. A contingent from the church--and the Episcopal diocese--promenaded down Christopher Street about three hours after AVP.

I don't know how many people marched or spectated, but I'd bet that number is much larger than that of those who performed at, and attended, Woodstock!  And, yes, we were strong and all the other things (except, perhaps, as full of drugs) as were those who went to Max Yasgur's farm to see and hear CSNY, Jimi Hendrix and all of those other legendary performers.

We got Lady Gaga and Edie Windsor.  While Edie's not a performer, she's one of our stars.  At least, she deserves the "star" treatment!

Moving Into The Revolution

Something is changing again, perhaps.  Within or without me?  

This is the time of year when such things happen.  Only a week ago, Governor Cuomo signed the same-sex marriage legislation--a couple of days before the anniversary of Stonewall.


And I think of the things that are coming up.  My official birthday is the 4th of this month (Yes, on "The Fourth"!); my own birthday--the one on which I gave birth to who I am now--is the 7th.  And the 14th is the anniversary of my name change and my sobriety.  (No, they didn't happen in the same year!)  


There's just something about this time of year.  I can understand why so many of the world's revolutions--including the American and French--have begun at this time of year.  


It's very, very interesting (at least to me) that I seem to be making new friends now.  And I decided, on a whim, to take a trip to someplace where I've never been before:  Prague.  I am also going to move ahead with my writing:  I will devote more time to it, and to getting it published and reaping other benefits for me.  Finally, I've decided, for once and for all, that I'm not going for a PhD, or any further schooling in any other academic area.  No, I'm not going to school for law or social work, either.  One thing I learned from my brief foray into PhD studies is that if I'm motivated to learn something, I don't need to be in school for it.


Well, at least I'm prepared in one way for whatever comes next:  I know that I'm going in a direction for which my previous experiences have provided me very little preparation but, I hope, ample resources.

When You Can't March, You Can Still Follow In Their Footsteps

I'd wanted to go to the Pride March today.  But I got sick:  Something I ate last night didn't agree with me, or with something else I ate.  My condition would have been utterly incompatible with marching.


I feel a little sad about that, mainly because I got a bit of a rush from marching in last year's procession.  Then again, that was a special march, for the LGBT community as well as me personally.  Last year, we marched on the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion.  And I was "counting down":  Only nine days stood between me and my surgery.


Maybe it was a good thing, in a way, that I couldn't go this year.  Would  following, or trying to follow,  the footprints of a memory have been a good idea?  Perhaps that works collectively, but for me personally, it usually doesn't work very well.  


Here's a definition of frustration:  I am a person who holds on to, and treasures, memories.  But doing something "for old time's sake" usually has disastrous consequences for me.  Or, at least, it has unintended consequences.


This year is the 40th anniversary of the first march.  I guess that's significant, but it doesn't have quite the same resonance as the anniversary of the rebellion.  Maybe it's because last year's march passed in front of the Stonewall.  Of course, nearly all of us stopped, or at least slowed down, there.  Many marchers, of course, had firsthand memories of the event.  All I had was what I've read about it, and my imagination.  All I could think about was the story, perhaps apocryphal, of Sylvia Rivera tossing out her red patent stiletto-heeled shoe at the cops as they were about to storm the tavern.


With that toss, or whatever else she did that night, she helped to launch the gay rights movement as we know it.  And she became one of its first victims.  Perhaps, in a way, that's not surprising, as rebellions and revolutions have a way of cannibalizing themselves.  


Even though she and other transgendered people played important roles in the Rebellion and the early days of the LGBT rights movements, they were left behind or tossed under the bus, depending on who's narrating the history.  It didn't take long for LGBT organizations--indeed, the entire community--to be dominated by white professional gay men.  Marginalized as they were, they still had much more wealth and influence than lesbians, let alone transgendered people.  


I met Sylvia Rivera once, briefly, not long before her death.  Plenty of people were put off by her, and I could see why.  For one thing, she was very loud and often combative, if not belligerent.  Plus, she lived a hard life and didn't age well:  No one was going to do a fashion shoot with her.


But there was something else, which I have not been able to articulate until now:  She not only used the seductive rhetoric which succesful movements generate in their early days (Think of "Power to the People!"); she helped to make the rhetoric--and, in turn, was shaped by it.  Even after the battles are won or lost, or at least changed, it's hard to give up those slogans and chants of one's youth, even if they are no longer the lingua franca of the people for and by whom revolutions are fought.  


There's a prof in my department who, in that sense, reminds me of her.  He still refers to female students and colleagues as "sistas" and their male counterparts as "brothas."  When he introduced me, at a poetry reading, as "Sista Justine," I was, in a way, flattered.  But at the same time I felt sorry for him (even if he has tenure!).  The battle has not been won; rather, it has moved on and re-formed.  Yet he still talks about people--and movements--as if Huey Newton and Stokey Carmichael were running the show.


Likewise, in some way, Sylvia never moved on from those heady early days.  In one sense, I can understand why:  It could be argued, and I would agree, that the direction the movement took benefited a relatively small part of the community.  Sylvia was not one of those who benefited, just as I would not have been.  


I can't help but to wonder what her role--and, more important, what kind of person she would be now.  Although she was born only seven years earlier than I was, there is more than a generation's remove between us.  When she was igniting the Rebellion, I was unaware of it:  I would not learn of it until many years later.  She was fighting battles that I and others are just beginning to learn how to fight, much less win.  


And, I sometimes feel that she's shadowing me, or that I'm following her shadow:  I met her at the end of her life, and attended her funeral just as I was starting toward the life I lead now.  And, she died at the same age at which I had my surgery.


While I wish I could have marched today, I am still following in her footsteps, and those of other Stonewall veterans.  That, I suppose, is the best homage I can pay to them.