Early Prides saw placards railing against fascism and police harassment, and calling for the liberation of gay people at today’s Pride you’re just as likely to see police officers and soldiers marching in uniform, representatives of the arms industry in corporate T-shirts and, for the first time this year, a flyover of military jets. Pride marches are still traditionally held in June to commemorate the raid.īut Pride’s radical anti-establishment roots are barely visible today.
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Stonewall also provided the impetus for the first Gay Day and Christopher Street Liberation Day protests, the direct precursors of Gay Pride (now renamed Pride in London). Both radical and reformist LGBT groups existed before the riots, but after them there was a boom in such militant groups as the Gay Liberation Front and STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries). The Stonewall riots precipitated a huge upsurge in LGBT consciousness. The police are currently posted outside the now-gentrified bar following Saturday night’s homophobic terrorist attack on a gay club in Orlando, Florida, in which 50 people died. In June 1969, trans and gay regulars fought back during a routine police raid on the Stonewall, leading to days of anti-cop riots. For some of us – especially sex workers, trans people, queer Muslims and queers of colour, that relationship continues. The community has a fraught relationship with law enforcement for years, the police were the strong arm of a homophobic and transphobic society, harassing, beating and imprisoning us at the behest of a ‘moral majority’.
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Many LGBT people will have mixed feelings at the sight of police patrolling outside the Stonewall Inn in New York.