The Importance of Pride
June 27, 2003
San Francisco’s Pride Week for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender (LGBT) people is a great idea. I wish that every city would have a comparable citywide celebration of those who are ostracized by intolerant and bigoted people just for being who they are.
Here in Washington, acceptance of LGBT people is slower in coming. People magazine featured a story on Chrissy Gephardt, the lesbian daughter of Democratic presidential hopeful Dick Gephardt, who has joined his campaign as an advisor. That and comparable stories in other papers did nothing to help or hurt his presidential aspirations. On the other hand, according to the Detroit News, Vice President Cheney has “continued to deal very awkwardly with the fact that [his daughter] Mary is gay,” and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich continues to have “rocky relations” with his lesbian half-sister Candace.
I was going to school and living in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1970s when the gay pride movement was just taking off. The first gay and lesbian pride march took place in New York City and several other cities on June 28, 1970 to commemorate the famous Stonewall Rebellion that had occurred a year earlier.
The Stonewall Inn was a gay bar on Christopher Street in the West Village, just east of Sheridan Square. Police had come to the bar shortly after midnight on June 28 to arrest employees of the bar for selling liquor without a license. A struggle ensued and a community that had been forced to live in the shadow of homophobia erupted with righteous defiance over the next two nights. The spontaneous act of fighting back was more than just a blow against police harassment, however. It also sparked a question in the minds of all people of goodwill, gay or straight: why should LGBT people be forced into a second-class status just because of who they are?
The spark of pride and rebellion that was lit at Stonewall has gone on to ignite pride marches all over the world.
While not gay myself, I have gone to gay pride events since the mid-1970s out of support for and solidarity with gay friends and colleagues. I remember talking with a veteran of the Asian Pacific American civil rights movement who was concerned upon hearing that I had gone to a pride event in Washington. She said, “Why do you go to these marches? Someone is going to think that you are gay.” I told her that “If I am going to be discriminated against because someone thinks I am gay, then it is all the more important that I be there to protest the unfairness and intolerance.”
Discrimination against LGBT people continues to this day, in ways that are both overt and subtle. Even the fact that I was going to name and celebrate some of my LGBT APA colleagues and had to pause for a moment to remember who was “out” to the general public shows how far we have yet to go to build a society that is not homophobic.
Like many APA activists who helped to shape Asian Pacific American Studies and the Asian Pacific American movement, I was deeply influenced by the pride movements of the African American, Latino, Native American, women’s rights and LGBT communities. “Black is beautiful” was a statement that beauty was not just what Hollywood or the fashion industry said it should be. “I am woman, hear me roar,” was a mortal wound to the bastions of unfair patriarchy, not just a lyric from a song.
In the face of indifference from drug companies and governmental agencies when the AIDS epidemic hit the gay male community in the 1980s, some LGBT activists took to the streets to make demands that their health needs be addressed. Their demands seemed radical then but were no more radical than demands by APA activists for redress for the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. The bottom line for both groups was a demand to be taken seriously, to be treated like everyone else and to have minimum guarantees of justice prevail.
I can still see the faces of the Act-Up activists in the 1980s who challenged complacency in the “establishment” gay community as well as homophobia in the broader community. Like the upstarts who pushed for an “Asian American” consciousness in the Chinatowns, Manilatowns and Japantowns of the 1970s, gay rights activists of that period had to buck not just intolerance in the broader world, but the forces of inertia in their own community (including those older LGBT men and women who had gotten used to life outside the spotlight, and who did not like having the boat rocked by gay rights activists).
I remember speaking to the New York chapter of Men of All Colors Together (MACT) about APA community issues in the early 1980s. Growing up in the same racist, sexist, ageist, anti-Semitic, homophobic society as the rest of us, these gay rights activists wanted to learn more about the APA community, including the concerns of both straight and gay APAs.
As we all celebrate Gay Pride Week this week, we would do well to start with MACT’s mature approach to the human family. There is so much we all have to learn about the other people who inhabit the planet with us. Why not pick up a book about LGBT issues, or strike up a conversation with LGBT friends or colleagues to see what’s on their minds?
Reach Phil Tajitsu Nash at asianweek(AT)nashinteractive.com.
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