I know there's a lot of question of the value of labels, whether they're forcing people into boxes, but when you don't have a word to describe how you feel and suddenly learn that there is a box you fit into, it's remarkably freeing, interestingly enough. It's knowing 'I'm not alone!' that makes all the difference, really. And even if it's not something that carries any real stigma, comparatively, it does complicate things; I'm not aromantic, I definitely want a life partner at some point, but... sexual desire isn't really part of it, and I haven't the slightest clue how I would even bring up the subject with a prospective partner.
Darn neurodiverse brain.
Anyways, getting back to the topic on hand. I've had a lot of queer friends over the years, and tend toward being very much in favor of acceptance and normalization and... other words that mean 'bigotry bad' and such. I'm a millennial, I grew up in a time where queer topics just weren't as taboo as they might have been in the past (Ellen's 'coming out' episode ran when I was in seventh grade, and Will & Grace was on the air during my time in high school), I knew people who were out of the closet by the time I graduated, and my sophomore year in college included someone coming out as the first of many trans* friends I've had over the years.
Even with all that, though, largely because of the media landscape when I came of age, I never really had a solid understanding of just what the struggle for civil rights looked like for queer communities. You always learn about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when you're in school, and maybe you learn about Cesar Chavez, but that's about it, when it comes to mid-twentieth-century civil rights. Even with the college history classes I've taken, I never really got a good understanding of exactly what the Stonewall uprising was. Thanks to the New York Public Library, that particular blank space in my knowledge of history has been filled, at least a bit.
The Stonewall Reader, published in honor of the 50th anniversary of the uprising, was very much an eye-opening read for me. It's separated into three sections, and each provides a number of voices to give a feel for what the general feel of the era was like, in a way that is sort of a cross between an anthology and an oral history. The first section of the book, "Before Stonewall", is designed to give an idea of what the state of queer rights was like in the 1960s, followed by "During Stonewall" that gives accounts by people who were actually there during the uprising, and "After Stonewall" to go over the civil rights movement that arose in the aftermath, and the changes in the culture through the last decades of the 20th century.
There's a distinct lack of voices on display here for gay white men, but that's somewhat by design; there's a definite intention on display here toward amplifying marginalized voices, so that there ends up being a focus on non-white writers and interviewees, but also a noticeable emphasis on trans* voices. This was particularly surprising to me; sure, I had always understood Stonewall to have been about the police cracking down on a gay bar, but I had no idea of the specific nature of that gay bar, that it was the only one that would really let the drag queens and transvestites in, that the police crackdowns would go differently for pre- and post-op transsexuals... And the number of accounts that include a mention of a chorus line stretching across the street and singing and doing Rockette-style dancing in front of a phalanx of riot police? Amazing.
What is rather less amazing, however, is the way that everything kind of changed in the aftermath. It's easy to look at the news right now and see how trans* rights haven't kept pace with the rest of the queer alphabet soup, and it's kind of obvious why, when you see how they were treated by the movements as a whole. Several of the interviewees in the "After Stonewall" section are downright bitter about how, after being such a fundamental part of that initial bout of civil disobedience, the trans* community was just kind of pushed aside, always stuck on the sidelines and getting strung along without nearly as much effort put into their rights. It's honestly infuriating to me.
I'm glad I took the time to read this. It's one of those important parts of American history that I had somehow never really heard about, and given its relative importance, it feels like it should be better-understood, better taught. Good on Penguin for publishing this, and amplifying the voices within.
The Stonewall Reader, published in honor of the 50th anniversary of the uprising, was very much an eye-opening read for me. It's separated into three sections, and each provides a number of voices to give a feel for what the general feel of the era was like, in a way that is sort of a cross between an anthology and an oral history. The first section of the book, "Before Stonewall", is designed to give an idea of what the state of queer rights was like in the 1960s, followed by "During Stonewall" that gives accounts by people who were actually there during the uprising, and "After Stonewall" to go over the civil rights movement that arose in the aftermath, and the changes in the culture through the last decades of the 20th century.
There's a distinct lack of voices on display here for gay white men, but that's somewhat by design; there's a definite intention on display here toward amplifying marginalized voices, so that there ends up being a focus on non-white writers and interviewees, but also a noticeable emphasis on trans* voices. This was particularly surprising to me; sure, I had always understood Stonewall to have been about the police cracking down on a gay bar, but I had no idea of the specific nature of that gay bar, that it was the only one that would really let the drag queens and transvestites in, that the police crackdowns would go differently for pre- and post-op transsexuals... And the number of accounts that include a mention of a chorus line stretching across the street and singing and doing Rockette-style dancing in front of a phalanx of riot police? Amazing.
What is rather less amazing, however, is the way that everything kind of changed in the aftermath. It's easy to look at the news right now and see how trans* rights haven't kept pace with the rest of the queer alphabet soup, and it's kind of obvious why, when you see how they were treated by the movements as a whole. Several of the interviewees in the "After Stonewall" section are downright bitter about how, after being such a fundamental part of that initial bout of civil disobedience, the trans* community was just kind of pushed aside, always stuck on the sidelines and getting strung along without nearly as much effort put into their rights. It's honestly infuriating to me.
I'm glad I took the time to read this. It's one of those important parts of American history that I had somehow never really heard about, and given its relative importance, it feels like it should be better-understood, better taught. Good on Penguin for publishing this, and amplifying the voices within.
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