This weekend is the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.
A lot has changed since then. Not everything, not enough, but a lot: people who would once have been wondering "is it safe to be seen in public with my partner" are fighting to have their marriages recognized.
I'm not, physically, up to being downtown at the NY Gay Pride March celebrating today, but it's important that it's there. It matters that it's part of the fabric of the city and the year: the cycle of parades, the MTA noting which buses will be rerouted (most parades go right down Fifth, and this one turns west to go down Christopher Street), the local newspaper Web page with photos of previous years and lists of events as the front page for New York City yesterday. That, and the sponsorships and banners hanging from the lamp posts on Fifth Avenue, are a different message from how it felt when I first marched in the 1980s, and we had to deal with counter-protestors shouting insults near St. Patrick's Cathedral. I can miss the extent to which it felt political, but I don't miss having people trying to get in our face to tell us we were evil.
I'm not much connected to specifically LGBT social groups, because I haven't felt much need, and haven't always been sure I would fit there. A piece of that is that![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cattitude is male, and was my only partner for a long time. But another piece is that I've got a social group, defined on other axes and interests, that is basically queer-friendly, people who don't react differently to "this is my partner" when I'm introducing adrian_turtle than when I'm introducing Cattitude. And that's not my cleverness, that's time and change in large parts of US and other western society.
When I mentioned a girlfriend to my parents at 17, they sent me to a psychologist. So I didn't introduce them to more girlfriends for a long time. But when I told my mother about Adrian, she said "I want to meet her," and did, and they like each other. That's not just that my mother is a cool person; it's a quarter century of progress and people pushing and being visible in a lot of ways and places.
A lot has changed since then. Not everything, not enough, but a lot: people who would once have been wondering "is it safe to be seen in public with my partner" are fighting to have their marriages recognized.
I'm not, physically, up to being downtown at the NY Gay Pride March celebrating today, but it's important that it's there. It matters that it's part of the fabric of the city and the year: the cycle of parades, the MTA noting which buses will be rerouted (most parades go right down Fifth, and this one turns west to go down Christopher Street), the local newspaper Web page with photos of previous years and lists of events as the front page for New York City yesterday. That, and the sponsorships and banners hanging from the lamp posts on Fifth Avenue, are a different message from how it felt when I first marched in the 1980s, and we had to deal with counter-protestors shouting insults near St. Patrick's Cathedral. I can miss the extent to which it felt political, but I don't miss having people trying to get in our face to tell us we were evil.
I'm not much connected to specifically LGBT social groups, because I haven't felt much need, and haven't always been sure I would fit there. A piece of that is that
cattitude is male, and was my only partner for a long time. But another piece is that I've got a social group, defined on other axes and interests, that is basically queer-friendly, people who don't react differently to "this is my partner" when I'm introducing adrian_turtle than when I'm introducing Cattitude. And that's not my cleverness, that's time and change in large parts of US and other western society.When I mentioned a girlfriend to my parents at 17, they sent me to a psychologist. So I didn't introduce them to more girlfriends for a long time. But when I told my mother about Adrian, she said "I want to meet her," and did, and they like each other. That's not just that my mother is a cool person; it's a quarter century of progress and people pushing and being visible in a lot of ways and places.
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In my recent experience the counter-protestors still shout insults. And, um, spit. At least at me. Also, last year someone in the middle of the Pridefest crowds tried to convince me to go to ex-gay therapy. I haven't had such experiences when I have gone to Pride in other cities. That said (and yeah, I'm generalizing from my own experience, for better or for worse), I think that the generally heightened nature of New York City tends to bring out a little bit of extremism and/or surrealism in nearly everybody. So you get a bit more of both ends of this particular spectrum. Sometimes that's great -- it drives people to innovate and produce and change things for the better. Sometimes you get some creepy lady in the middle of a packed stretch of queer people trying to get them all to subscribe to her brand of religiously oriented "psychological" "help". (It's a little bit like the people who need to preach to packed subway cars.)
I decided it was perfectly all right to spend today away from the crowds, and did something that I knew would restore my sanity after some weeks of stress. Honoring the work that has happened in past decades is not as simple as coming home from the march covered in stickers proclaiming that "God Made Me ____". That said, I do plan to check out the NYPL's Stonewall exhibit tomorrow -- I think it only runs through Tuesday.
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Activism really does change society as a whole and attitudes in individual people and it's pretty cool to see progress so concretely.