The Stonewall riots were not the birth of the gay rights movement. They weren’t even the first time LGBTQ+ people had fought back against police harassment. In 1966, in the Tenderloin neighbourhood of San Francisco, transgender customers of Compton’s Cafeteria had attacked police, following years of harassment and discrimination by both cops and management. Seven years before that, when police had raided Coopers, a donut shop in the city nestled between two gay bars, LGBTQ+ patrons had attacked officers after the arrest of a number of drag queens, sex workers and gay men. [...]
Those two decades, however, would be among the hardest for LGBTQ+ people in US history, as the greater visibility of the homosexual identity led to a conservative backlash, and a moral panic in the media that was capitalised upon by politicians. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association included homosexuality in its new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, classifying it as a “sociopathic personality disturbance”. Meanwhile, Senator Joe McCarthy was using public revulsion towards homosexuals in his campaign against leftists. Communists and homosexuals were inextricably linked as anti-American subversives, he argued. Talking to reporters, McCarthy stated: “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker.” [...]
As Pride parades have been organised around the world, LGBTQ+ people have often found themselves as proxies in wider political battles. In recent years accusations have been made that Pride has become part of a “homonationalist” project, where the victories won by LGBTQ+ activists since the 50s, in the face of widespread opposition and hostility, are now portrayed as inevitable products of a national culture. Such a process is used to portray other countries as “less civilised”, despite the role that European empires had in imposing anti-sodomy laws in their colonies and suppressing other cultural approaches to gender. This is doubly ironic, considering the role that US evangelical movements still have in funding political campaigns in many parts of Africa for the continuation or even strengthening of colonial-era anti-sodomy laws. Last year, Richard Grenell, Donald Trump’s ambassador to Germany, attacked Iran, saying that “barbaric public executions are all too common in a country where consensual homosexual relationships are criminalised and punishable by flogging and death”. This is true, of course – but then the same could be said for the US’s close regional ally, Saudi Arabia.
