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Further Reading
1998 Gay Pride World Wide
Adelaide, Australia-- Sunday, August 2
Albany, New York-- Sunday, October 4; Washington...
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By
Bill Andriette
The largest gay political organizations in America last month pleaded with ABC to keep a sit-com on the air. What would the rioters have thought at the Stonewall Inn, 29 years ago this June?
Gay and lesbian leaders pleading with a TV network may be unusual, but the gesture is not. Almost all gay politics today orients itself toward
some powerful entity-- Congress, the UN, organized psychiatry,
big broadcasting-- for the sake of some benefit or token of respect. The boon may be rights laws, partner benefits, harsher punishments for muggers who utter anti-gay slurs, or a gay-positive TV show. What we seek may
be variously good, useful, or misguided. But the focus is getting something from some entity more powerful than we imagine ourselves, inevitably on
its terms.
The Stonewall rioters had a radically different agenda. The rocks and bottles they hurled were aimed to defend basic freedom from rampaging cops, from whom they wanted nothing except to be left alone.
For the drag queens, hustlers, and other ne'er-do-wells who frequented the Stonewall Inn, the fundamental matter was protecting queers from a state that would lock us in jail and mental hospitals, lobotomize and castrate us,
arrest us for publishing our books and magazines, and pack us into paddy wagons for going to a bar.
For all the real progress gay people have made since Stonewall, the injustices that spawned the Stonewall Riots are still with us, only on a greater scale. There are more people in prison in the US for
consensual behavior-- around drugs and sex-- than ever, at a rate higher than probably any society in history. It is sobering to reflect that if Oscar Wilde faced trial today in England or North America for sex with teenage hustlers,
he would suffer a longer sentence than he did a century ago. After prison, the late-20th century Wilde would be tracked for life on a public registry of sex offenders, and sized up by psychiatrists as a candidate for
chemical castration.
Our current dilemma is rooted in the power of the state, the media, and professional "experts" over individuals and communities. The power of these institutions today owes a debt to the techniques developed
in the 20th century's experiments with totalitarianism. The "enemies of people" vary, but the modern methods of demonizing people are alike- whether the target is capitalist running-dogs, sex predators, Jews, or drug pushers.
No one has figured out how to declaw this monster. But part of a solution requires paying close attention to the aspects of our lives that can't be expressed on the little screen. Here, gay people have a leg up.
The list of gay pride events around the world this season suggests something obscured in the hullabaloo over a TV show-- that gay life is essentially concrete and local. You don't need a very wide gay circle to know people
who've taken a fist up their ass, dripped wax on a trick, love eating out assholes, sucked off a 14-year-old, guzzled piss, or otherwise done things that nobody ever gave them permission to. These are experiences relatively
ordinary among gay men, but still shocking in the world beyond. Gay pride day happens in hundreds of places around the world where our precious networks of subversive sensibility quietly exist. See you at the parade!
| Author Profile: Bill Andriette |
| Bill Andriette is features editor of
The Guide |
| Email: |
theguide@guidemag.com |
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