For the second year in a row I sat on the sidewalk on the side of Broadway enjoying the Gay Pride Parade in Chicago with a close friend from college. She had mentioned to an acquaintance down there that I was coming to visit during the parade, and this acquaintance asked, “why, is he gay?”

Seriously, though, why would anybody who WASN’T gay go to Pride?

Well, thanks to that movement, and the women’s rights movements, and all of the other humanist movements in our history, many of us can build roles for ourselves beyond the straightjackets imposed by superstition and tradition. Not just free to explore and enjoy our own personal sexual identities, whatever those might be. Free to be fathers who are emotionally available to their children, not slaves to endless labor and a place in the home as a cold, hard disciplinarian. Free to be mothers with lives outside the kitchen, nursery and bedroom. Free in so many ways that we take for granted, as imperfect as those freedoms are.

I mean, why would you want to celebrate, to commemorate, a movement that fought not only for themselves, but for all of us, unless you were gay?

What Have We Learned From Stonewall?

On the late night/early morning of June 27-28, 1969, all that changed.

By the time the police knew what had hit them, four of them were in the hospital, one with a broken wrist, and were chased by an enraged mob back into the gay bar from which they’d just emerged. Armed with nothing more than garbage, bricks appropriated from a nearby construction site and their bare hands, the gay community of Greenwich Village rose up in a screaming, quivering fury and said with one voice, “No more.” What seemed to set the crowd off were eyewitnesses who saw NYPD officers beat and tear the shirt off a lesbian patron.

What is most readily and easily forgotten, however, is that the riots were conducted not merely by white young gays but also straight sympathizers, lesbians, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and the middle-aged and even elderly as well as the young.

Oppression and control don’t always rely upon raids and beatings, they rely upon the FEAR of those things, the fear of being exposed as not “normal”. When cops and the religious nuts who command them go after one segment of society for being dirty or evil, they can do it to anybody.

When I was a kid, my world revolved around music. I’ve had music being poured directly into my ears starting with a little GE 9-Volt transistor at the age of five up until the iPod that is surgically attached to me now, and two of the artists I loved most from the very beginning were Elton John and Queen. Oh, the taunting and abuse once junior high and high school rolled along, for liking those ‘fags’ … why do I listen to them?

Must be a fag, of course. Which struck me as insane.

I wasn’t all that focused on Elton’s or Freddie’s sexuality … though I admired that they didn’t give a damn what anybody thought about it. I loved the way their music and their personas were THEIRS, that they had created “Elton John” from the dreams of Reginald Dwight growing up in his staid English home, and “Freddie Mercury” from the ambitions of immigrant Farrokh Bulsara. As I was growing up in my sheltered, lily-white suburb, that there was a world where someone could BE who they wanted to be, CREATE their life out of whole cloth … what could be more glorious than that?

As I got older, went to college, I learned from GBLT people I met along the way the pain and rejection that so many experience, and the opportunity that so many create for themselves out of those rejections, the blossoming of a personal freedom out of the ashes of those rejections. What can be more human than looking at a world that says you aren’t wanted and refusing to submit to that kind of rejection, that kind of bigotry and hate?

Look back at the sweep of human history and so much of what is beautiful and grand about people was created by people who refused to be pigeonholed, refused to be restrained by tradition and the farce that is “human decency”, as expounded by authoritarians and self-loathing haters.

Queer Culture is a celebration of that basic human potential, to create one’s own life, own’s own persona, one’s own opportunities. Queer culture is a creation of communities of people who’ve decided that the world can be a beautiful place where they belong, and no one is going to tell them otherwise.

My life is richer for the gay rights movement, as it is richer for the women’s rights movement, and the civil rights movement, and the aboriginal rights movement and so on and so on. This straight, middle-class, white man enjoys a better life with more opportunities thanks to those queens who went toe-to-toe with brutal thugs in uniform thirty years ago, and it seems to me the least I can do is go to a parade and cheer for them and their spiritual children and grandchildren, with grateful thanks.