The Importance of Gay Pride...For Us All

Phil Nash finds common ground, mutual learning, between gay pride and APA civil rights movements

San Francisco’s Pride Week for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people (GLBT) is a great idea. I wish that every city would have a comparable city-wide celebration of people who are ostracized by intolerant and bigoted people just for being who they are.

Here in Washington, acceptance of GLBT people is uneven. PEOPLE magazine featured a story on Chrissy Gephardt, the lesbian daughter of Democratic presidential hopeful Dick Gephardt, who has joined his campaign as an advisor. On the other hand, according to the Detroit News, Vice President Cheney has "continued to deal very awkwardly with the fact that [his daughter] Mary is gay," and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich continues to have "rocky relations" with his lesbian half-sister Candace.

I was going to school and living in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1970s when the gay pride movement was just taking off. The first gay and lesbian pride march took place in New York and several other cities on June 28, 1970 to commemorate the famous Stonewall Rebellion that had occurred a year earlier.

The Stonewall Inn was a gay bar on Christopher Street in the West Village, just east of Sheridan Square. Police had come to the bar shortly after midnight on June 28 to arrest employees of the bar, ostensibly for selling liquor without a license. A struggle ensued, and a community that had been forced to live in a shadow of homophobia erupted in righteous defiance over the next two nights. The spontaneous act of fighting back was more than just a blow against police harassment, however. It also sparked a question in the minds of all people of goodwill, gay and straight alike: why should GLBT people be forced into a second-class status just because of who they are?

The spark of pride and rebellion that was lit at Stonewall has gone on to ignite pride marches all over the world. Groups such as the Gay Liberation Front and Campaign for Homosexual Equality in England, for example, hold annual pride events in London and other British cities.

While not gay myself, I have gone to gay pride events since the mid-1970s out of support for and solidarity with gay friends and colleagues. I remember talking with a veteran of the Asian Pacific American civil rights movement, who was concerned upon hearing that I had gone to a pride event in Washington. She said, "Why do you go to these marches? Someone is going to think that you are gay." I told her that if I was going to be discriminated against because someone thought I was gay, then it was all the more important that I be there to protest the unfairness and intolerance.

Discrimination against GLBT people continues to this day, in ways that are both overt and subtle. Even the fact that, as I write this piece, I hesitate to name and celebrate some of my GLBT Asian Pacific American colleagues if I am not sure if they are "out" to the general public shows how far we have to go to build a society that is not homophobic.

Like many Asian Pacific American activists who helped to shape Asian Pacific American Studies and the Asian Pacific American movement, I was deeply influenced by the pride movements of the African American, Latino, Native American, women’s rights, and GLBT communities. "Black is beautiful" was a statement that beauty was not just what Hollywood or the fashion industry said it should be. "I am woman, hear me roar," was a mortal wound to the bastions of unfair patriarchy, not just a lyric from a song.

In the face of the indifference of drug companies and governmental agencies when the AIDS epidemic hit the gay male community hard in the 1980s, some GLBT activists took to the streets to make demands that their health needs be addressed. Their demands seemed radical then, but were no more radical than demands by APA activists for redress for the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. The bottom line for both groups was a demand to be taken seriously, to be treated like everyone else, and to have minimum guarantees of justice prevail.

I can still see the faces of the Act-Up activists in the 1980s who challenged both complacency in the "establishment" gay community as well as the homophobia in the broader community. Like the upstarts who pushed for an "Asian American" consciousness in the Chinatowns, Manilatowns, and Japantowns of the 1970s, gay rights activists of that period had to buck not just intolerance in the broader world, but the forces of inertia in their own community (including those older GLBT men and women who had gotten used to life outside the spotlight, and who did not like the boat rocked by gay rights activists).

I remember speaking to the New York chapter of the Men of All Colors Together (MACT) about Asian American community issues in the early 1980s. Growing up in the same racist, sexist, age-ist, anti-Semitic, homophobic society as the rest of us, these gay rights activists wanted to learn more about the APA community including the concerns of both straight and gay APAs.

As we all celebrate Gay Pride Week this week, we would do well to start with MACT’s interest in knowing more about people of all backgrounds. There is so much we all have to learn about the other people who inhabit the planet with us. Why not pick up a book about GLBT issues, or strike up a conversation with a GLBT friend or colleague to see what’s on their mind?

Other Readings of Interest from the Archives

• India's Online Gays - Revolution, or High-Tech Closet?
  By Sandip Roy, (PNS)
  Does virtual community offer only virtual liberation?
• Deepa Mehta's Fire Illuminates Some Burning Questions
  By Sandip Roy-Chowdhury (PNS)
  PNS commentary on a controversial film that’s pushing gay and lesbian issues to India’s front pages
• AAV Interview: "Notorious" Margaret Cho
  By Yayoi Lena Winfrey, AAV Contributing Editor
  In The Notorious C.H.O. opening nationwide, Margaret Cho looks outside the Asian-American community to adderss her devoted gay and lesbian audiences
• Cited Detroit News article about Vice President Dick Cheney and daughter Mary
• Aging with Pride
  By May Chow, AsianWeek
  The author recommends this related reading from our friends at S.F.'s AsianWeek. [Read in new window]