In June the world is painted with the colors of sexual dissidences. The streets are packed with hundreds of thousands of people proudly celebrating their sexual orientations and diverse gender identities. On all continents, from end to end, the rainbow flags with the popular design created by the American activist Gilbert Baker in 1978, as well as the trans flags, with white, light blue and pink stripes, among many others, are waved every year. cake, which was worn for the first time by the activist Monica Helms in Phoenix, Arizona (USA), at the end of the nineties, and the intersectional flag, which adds black and brown to that party of color to talk about Afro people and antiracism.
This idea of celebrating with pride has a specific origin in history and dates back to a series of riots on June 28 and 29, 1969, in New York.. It all happened when a group of police officers raided a mafia-run gay bar on a hot summer night.
(You can read: Colombia is the deadliest country in Latin America for LGBTI people: special report)
The place was called the Stonewall Inn, located on Christopher Street, a marginal area of the city, and it was the only gay bar where you could dance, a refuge in the midst of oppression when homosexuality was considered a disease, homosexual sex was illegal in all of the United States, except in Illinois, and gays, lesbians, bisexuals, drag queens, and transgender people had no laws to protect them. Raids were common in bars, but in 1969, in the midst of his re-election campaign, the then mayor of New York, Republican John Lindsay, sought to reinforce the idea of ”social cleansing.”
(We recommend: Estonia becomes the first Baltic country to legalize marriage equality)
Colombian historian Felipe Caro Romero, one of the leading academics in research on the history of social movements of sexual and gender dissidence, remembers that episode. “It was a period of insecurity, but in the raid that night, people simply refused to listen to the police and get on the trucks, and thus started a scuffle between the police and the bar patrons,” says Caro, who He is currently working on his PhD in Latin American History at the Katholische Universitätt Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany.
The atmosphere then heated up. People who were passing by that night joined the confrontation and the group of agents ended up cornered inside the bar. Outside, meanwhile, everything was jubilant, and the demonstrators threw bricks, coins and whatever they found at hand. The police soon called for reinforcements and soon put down the revolt. The balance that night was thirteen protesters arrested and at least one policeman injured.
(Keep reading: The risks and setbacks of the anti-LGBTIQ law passed by the Ugandan Parliament)
But the spark did not go out there. The demonstrators called for further protests the next day by writing chalk on the streets and walls, drawing an even larger crowd that raised their voices of protest in fury.. These were intense nights of protests that led to the birth of the gay liberation movement, which became massive and gave life to associations such as the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance, a source of inspiration for thousands around the world.
Hence, Caro points out that “Stonewall is not so important for what happened, but for what it meant.” In his words, that episode “condensed that contained rage that finally exploded and prompted a whole mobilization for liberation, which lasted at least 20 or 30 years, a way of saying: ‘That’s enough, we’re not going to put up with the criminalization, penalization, medicalization, religious persecution. We are worthy of anything and we are revolutionary subjects’”.
(You can read: Ukraine: Could the war allow the advancement of the rights of LGBTIQ people?)
Stonewall is important not so much for what happened, but for what it meant.
However, the Colombian historian clarifies that the social movement for the rights of sexual and gender dissidence did not start that night. Before Stonewall, he points out, there were several social organizations in the United States, Europe and Latin America. “The homophile movement, as what was happening in the United States was called before,” says Caro Romero, “was a movement that had been founded since 1950 and fought for the rights of the sexual minority from a less confrontational perspective. They spoke of homosexuality as a disease and that, therefore, they had to be considered as sick and be careful.
Another precedent dates back to the end of the 19th century in Europe, where there were already large organizations that fought for the rights of this population. The sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, for example, founded the Institute for the Study of Sexuality in Berlin, which, according to the historian, “seeked to study and dignify sexual and gender dissidence in the world.” An effort that was finally halted by World War II and the rise of fascism..
(Of interest: Trans Law: the implications of the new legislation approved by Spain)
In Latin America, although there were no such forceful political organizations, Felipe Caro Romero mentions that there is a record of cases of groups, such as “the famous dance of the 41 fagots in Mexico, in 1901, which reported groups of homosexual men who they met to explore their sexuality and escape a little from the social control that existed at that time”.
But Stonewall marked a before and after due to its forcefulness and the impulse it gave to the idea of dignifying sexual and gender dissent, which until then were considered shameful characteristics that had to be hidden. That herd – when we were already living the rise of the black, women’s, and Latino rights movements, the sexual revolution, and the 1968 student protests and anti-Vietnam war– marked the start of the modern idea of LGBTIQ+ pride.
“The riots happened just at a critical moment of social mobilization in the West, and from there this idea of ’gay pride’ arose, very much hand in hand with two slogans: gay power, which alluded to the black power of the movements of demands of the black struggles, and that of gay liberation, making reference to the anti-colonial liberation movements”, explains Caro.
(Also: Violence against LGBTIQ+ leaders by illegal groups increases: Attorney General’s Office)
In colombia
For those who have studied the history of the LGBTIQ+ movement, one of the most interesting characteristics is that it has always maintained a kind of network of international contacts. Thus, for example, pride marches expanded from the outset. The first was organized in the United States a year after the events at Stonewall. About three years later, they began to convene in other countries. And towards the eighties the first ones began to be made in Latin America.
“These marches were carried out without any official planning or official mandate. There was no institution that controlled or financed these marches in different parts of the world, but it was the very organizations that began to emerge that saw in this Stonewall thing an inspiration and an excuse to use for very local purposes and present their own problems and their own difficulties”, recounts the historian Felipe Caro Romero.
(Keep reading: With the hoisting of 20 flags they commemorate LGBTI Pride Day at a monument in Bogotá)
Colombia was no stranger to that wave that was spreading across the planet, although the start of the movement in the country began with a lie.
This is how the activist Manuel Velandia, one of the most popular figures in the national LGBTIQ+ process, tells it. In 1977, a text by León Zuleta, also an activist, was published in a Trotskyist newspaper in which he stated that there was a group of 10,000 people in the country that made up the Colombian Homosexual Movement. The lie, Velandia recounts, was that it wasn’t really such a number: “I call Léon and he tells me: ‘I’m sorry to inform you that all the zeroes are false, but we are already two. If someone from Bogotá shows up, I give them your audio section and your phone so they can communicate with you”.
The norm changed in 1980, but it began to be in force in 1981. When the norm changed, they were forced to change the Police Code of Bogotá, and thus we can request permission to march.
Since then, the first groups of what would later be called the Homosexual Liberation Movement of Colombia began to form, centered in Medellín and Bogotá, which among many other things organized the first pride march in Colombia on June 28, 1983. .
(Also read: Most Colombians support more LGBTIQ+ people in politics)
“On April 9, 1977, I found out that I am a criminal,” recalls Velandia. I did not know that homosexuality was a crime in Colombia. It stopped being a disease in 1936 and that same year it became a crime (…) The norm changed in 1980, but it began to be in force in 1981. When the norm changed, they were forced to change the Bogotá Police Code, and so we can ask permission to march through the city”.
The march took place on June 28. About thirty people walked from the bullring to the Plaza de Las Nieves, in Bogotá.
Manuel Velandia once wrote a poem to the march. He titled it Ríos de libertad: “We are a river of people who walk, / a march, a revolt, a rebellion / that commemorates the life and struggles / of those who, from the trenches of activism, seek to build equity, / the right to be free / and the possibility of existing without being persecuted, / insulted, ridiculed, excluded, rejected, despised or reviled”.
(Also: In 2022, every two and a half days an LGBTIQ+ person was murdered)
That river caught its course at Stonewall. And all the steps taken since then, like marriage equality and self-determination of gender identity, owe something to the young people who stood up to the police and to the activists who organized afterward.
WILLIAM MORENO HERNANDEZ
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
TIME
More news at eltiempo.com
#riots #led #start #LGBTIQ #pride #Colombia #world