Happy (?) Anniversary, Stonewall

An ad in the New York Times Sunday Styles section commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, that legendary 1969 uprising in a Greenwich Village gay bar. Rousts by police were not uncommon in these settings, but a combination of especially swift police brutality and We’ve-Had-Enough patron sentiments resulted in a roaring riot. What we would now call the Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender crowd drove the police back and kept them there for days.

If such an ad didn’t say enough about the changed attitudes, the one below it sure did: A furniture and carpet store entreats:

Love love love…the partnership registry…co-create your home from the ground up.

A more cynical person might say that much of the progress towards acceptance of LGBT folks is, in fact, market driven. A really cynical person might say that the poor economy will push this acceptance to a new high. Retailers who want to survive will market across all lines: gender, class, shoe size.

I, however, am marking this historic occasion by shrugging off such thoughts, lifting my coffee mug and toasting the people who still worry that their sexual orientation or their place along the gender continuum might cause them to be fired, humiliated, hurt or killed. Sisters and brothers: I’m with you.

A recommendation to my blog readers: Go find a copy of “Stone Butch Blues” by Leslie Feinberg. (Other Feinberg insights can be found on the writer’s Transgender Warrior site.) You might have to get your favorite independent bookseller to order it for you, as it may now be out of print. This is a remarkable, heartbreaking book. (Along lines of “Fat Girl” by Judith Moore, another bit of painful genius in book form.) I could not put “Stone Butch Blues” down and it prompted me to get other works by Feinberg, including the essay collection “Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue.”

Feinberg isn’t the voice for all LGBT people any more than Ann Coulter is a spokesperson for me, another white female writer. But the story of oppression, uprising, triumph and hope is everyone’s story.

Onward!