Essay On The Stonewall Riots

The Stonewall Riots of 1969 in New York City’s Greenwich Village are remembered as a significant event in the struggle for LGBTQIA+ liberation in the United States and around the world. The Riots, often referred to as a rebellion by activists today, started when police officers, including four undercover officers, raided the Stonewall Inn and were met with resistance by the customers, many of whom were cross-dressing or presented as gender-conforming. Passersby witnessed the violent arrests and the people’s resistance. They joined the group of rioters in the ensuing hours of broken store windows, police car windows, and physical violence between the police and the predominantly LGBTQIA+ Stonewall customers. The heavy police violence and surveillance

In the following years, the New York City-based Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) and Gay Liberation Front (GLF) were formed as public spaces for social and political organizing and education of LGBTQIA+ people and community allies (NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project). The growing involvement in and legitimacy of the LGBTQIA+ rights movement both in New York City and across the country included the ability to publicly operate organizations and locations like the GAA and GLF, in addition to the overturning of laws in multiple states that prohibited gatherings of LGBTQIA+ people and guaranteed the ability to discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people. Mainstream education on the history of queer liberation uncritically identifies this era of an increasing institutional presence and conditional social acceptance of the queer community as ‘progress’, despite the state violence, hate crimes, and institutional discrimination queer people were still experiencing during this time. Struggle for liberation is rarely palatable and concise enough for accurate headlines, political slogans, or campaign

President Reagan did not publicly acknowledge the epidemic himself for the first six years of its senseless suffering, death, and significant cultural loss, disproportionately felt and experienced by the gay community (Tumulty). During those years, the administration’s acknowledgment came in the form of its fight to shrink federal funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Thomas). Fear tactics similar to those used to propagate the Red Scare hysteria were used by the Reagan administration, mainstream media, and anti-gay Catholic Church leaders to win the public’s support for Reagan’s agenda of inhumane and impractical policy goals related to the epidemic. The Church and other anti-gay institutions blamed the LGBTQIA+ community for the creation and spread of HIV/AIDS and pointed to a lack of strong public protest of the recent legal protections and social acceptance of the LGBTQIA+ community as a sign of growing immorality across the country. Religious, public, and governmental leaders’ responses to the current COVID-19 pandemic have similarly scapegoated immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, people of Color, and people of non-Christian religions for the inconsistent responses by the government, such