thebreakfastgenie:gaywrites:“The first Pride was a riot.”This is frustrating to me because it’s such
thebreakfastgenie:gaywrites:“The first Pride was a riot.”This is frustrating to me because it’s such an oversimplification of gay history. Stonewall was about police violence (as well as the right for gay people to exist in public) and is largely credited as the first major event in the modern gay rights movement. But posts like this tend to be dismissive of marriage equality, which is something I see often among the younger generations, who see marriage equality as the “soft” issue that became acceptable to straight people, politicians, and corporations. It is necessary to remember that marriage equality also grew out of violence. The prevalence of marriage equality as a prioritized struggle was the direct result of the AIDS crisis. Gay men (and bi men and trans women) saw legal marriage as the best avenue to protect their rights to be with their dying partners, to be allowed to remain in their homes instead of being evicted because they weren’t on the lease. Since gay people couldn’t be married to their partners there were also cases where bodies were released to immediate family who in many cases were homophobic and barred the grieving partner from funerals and burials. The focus on marriage equality was a source of contention within the LGBT+ community from the beginning precisely because people were worried other issues would be overlooked and those concerns remain valid. But don’t overlook that marriage equality like all other gay rights issues was a fight for survival. -- source link