Yesterday was Seattle’s observance of Pride, the annual celebration of the Stonewall riots of June 28th, 1969, in which queer people said “no more” to police violence against them. But though the riots were started by black trans sex workers & drag sex workers, one wouldn’t know it from the modern celebrations which commemorate their struggle. In nearly every US city, the celebrations are run and dominated by white, vanilla cisgender people who not only have never done sex work, but in many cases actively work to throw sex workers under the bus. They seem to care so little for the “T” in “LGBT” that in many cases trans people have established separate (though chronologically adjacent) celebrations, and are so embarrassingly tone-deaf to the continuing struggle of black people that they eagerly invite cops and politicians to participate in the Pride events which purport to honor queer people’s struggle against the very institutions those “authorities” represent. I might feel differently if those institutions had grown, and become less violent and more accepting of individual rights, but that is nothing like the case; politicians still scheme to marginalize trans people; to shore up a system that exposes black people to brutality, slavery and even murder at the hands of the police; and to persecute sexual freedom by infantilizing sex workers and demonizing our clients, friend and families. Police inflict violence on black people, rape sex workers and hound our clients, and display a shocking lack of concern for violence against trans people (these effects are multiplied exponentially in the case of black, trans sex workers); and yet, picket-fence queers and Gay, Inc not only think it’s perfectly OK to invite those same pigs to participate in Pride parades, but also in many cases castigate queer people like myself who have the nerve to say out loud that this isn’t acceptable.
Well, here’s my message for Big Gay: Fuck You. Fuck your respectability politics and your abandonment of “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” in favor of “We’re just like you straight folks, right down to getting married, living in the suburbs & sucking the dick of power.” Fuck your abandonment of queer people who are kinky, nonwhite, non-monogamous, gender-nonconforming, promiscuous, sex working or otherwise uninterested in being nonthreatening to straight vanilla people. Fuck your completely ignoring the government jihad against sex workers until Rentboy was caught up on it. Fuck your desire to join the military in order to expand American hegemony over the rest of the world. Fuck your licking the arseholes of huge fascist corporations who betray every principle the LGBT movement used to stand for because they pay for your fancy Pride parades with money that would’ve been better spent helping queer & trans youth driven out of their homes and into survival sex work; and fuck your eager rimming of politicians who absolve those young people’s families of blame by pretending the reason they’re doing the work is because they were forced into it by imaginary “pimps”. Fuck your whole picket-fence, big table, might-as-well-be-straight-except-for-where-you-stick-your-dick mentality. Until you’re ready to stand up for the people who launched the movement which gave you the rights you’re celebrating this week, you’re no better that the representatives of the fascist police state you’ve happily climbed into bed with. And that is nothing to be proud of.
