COVER
The
LGBTQ Debt To The Civil Rights Movement Racialized communities have played a crucial role in the fight for LGBTQ liberation; let’s not forget that By Olivia Nuamah
SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2020
The omission of the role of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and homeless street youth from the narratives of the beginnings of the LGBTQ movement has laid the groundwork for misunderstanding the connections between historical and contemporary violence. The role that slavery and the ensuing fight for civil rights played in the birth of the LGBTQ movement is crucial to understanding the pathway Black and Latinx communities carved in the fight for LGBTQ liberation. The civil war in America was fought over slavery; when abolition of slavery failed to have the intended effect of uplifting Black lives, civil rights legislation was introduced to reinforce Black equality with federal oversight. The LGBTQ community was one of the most significant beneficiaries of Black and Latinx activism across America, activism that was fuelled by discrimination across race, sex and gender lines for almost a century before Stonewall. At the time of Stonewall in 1969, the civil rights movement in the US was at its end, with legislation introduced five years earlier.
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IN MAGAZINE
From police brutality to employment and free speech, Black people were being mistreated and losing court battles, while the same laws yielded wins for white gays and lesbians. Across the country, riots had been started by trans, Black, Latinx and street-involved youth without the same countrywide calls for change or movement building momentum. Stonewall was no different in form and content from the incidents of civil unrest already happening across the country at the time: the only difference was the presence of a majority white, gay, male audience armed with legal wins, a countrywide network and a membership of thousands. There is virtually no information about the lives of the Black and Latinx participants who were documented as inspiring the unrest at Stonewall. We know precious little about their families, their friends or their lives outside of The Stonewall Inn and riot. The narrative of Stonewall limits our collective past to the deeds of white gay men, while further silencing the historical role of Black and Latinx communities in the building of the LGBTQ movement. But in fact, slavery, emancipation and the civil rights era had a
