I was in my fondly forgotten twenties when I made it to 53 Christopher Street, site of the 1969 Stonewall riots and, since 1994, the second most historic address in Greenwich Village. (The apartment building from Friends is three blocks over.) The Stonewall Inn that stands there now is only the latest establishment to bear that name, the premises having served as a stables, then a bakery, and later a speakeasy before the mafia relaunched it as a gay bar in the late Sixties. There were no fire doors and no running water; the walls were painted black to cover up past fire damage. It was no Studio 54.
In the small hours of 28 June 1969, police carried out a routine raid but this time were met by resistance from patrons in an uprising that lasted six nights. ‘Limp wrists were forgotten,’ The Village Voice reported at the time. Stonewall wasn’t the first pushback or even the start of the Pride movement, which preceded the riots by a few years, but it was the venting of pent-up anger, pain and indignity. A wounded cry from the fags and the fairies, the queers and the queens, that they’d had enough and weren’t going to live their lives only in the small hours anymore.
By the time I got to Stonewall, 45 years and a whole world later, all this was prologue. The Obergefell case and a constitutional right to same-sex marriage were one year away. Windsor had already filleted the Defence of Marriage Act and a decade prior Lawrence had struck down anti-sodomy laws. Barack Obama and Dick Cheney had both come out for gay marriage. The fight was won and the Stonewall I visited seemed to reflect that: almost empty, aside from a couple of middle-aged guys day-drinking at the bar.
It’s not obvious what Pride or the LGBT movement has done for gays and lesbians lately but they’ve done wonders for the careers of Matt Walsh and Ron DeSantis
I had imagined it would be special, I had willed it to be special: retreading the stilettoed steps of queer history. But it was empty, and not just the bar — New Yorkers barely drink at night, let alone at lunchtime. The history made there was no longer there, as though it had gone off out into the world and never come back. Blame gentrification and Giulianification, but Stonewell felt glumly unhaunted by its old ghosts.
It seemed fitting to me then, and even more so now, that the Stonewall mythos is central to the Pride industry. Pride too has been hollowed of its history, a movement that has slain most of its dragons and so has invented new ones in the form of believers in biological reality. June is Pride Month. How that distinguishes it from the other eleven months is becoming harder to tell.
It’s the time when corporations rainbow their social media profiles and let customers know how DIVERSE and INCLUSIVE they are, even if those customers just want to buy MARGARINE or CAR INSURANCE. Unless, of course, their customers happen to live in markets where displays of diversity and inclusivity might cost said corporation financially or politically. Fashy post-liberals are fond of gurning about ‘globohomo’. Bless their twisted little hearts. Globohomo? Nah, we wring our hands about Uganda but as long as political and corporate power panders to us at home, we won’t demand they put that power to use to help gays in danger overseas. It’s homoism in one country for us.
The only trace of politics at Pride events in recent years has been the annual ‘never kissed a Tory’/‘LGBT Conservatives not welcome’ discourse. Other than that, Pride has become little more than a marketing opportunity for capital and a platform for political parties to play out their internal psychodramas over trans rights.
The novelist Philip Hensher sees in the mainstreaming of Pride a ‘performance of sympathy’ that ‘invades minority lives, controls them, assumes the freedom to silence their voices’. In this he reads an implicit message: ‘Watch the licensed floats of gay-friendly insurance companies go by from behind the barrier. And be as grateful as I tell you to be.’ In being proud publicly, Pride was inherently threatening to straight society, challenging its laws, norms and prejudices about homosexuality. That Pride is almost unrecognisable today.
This is not indulgent nostalgia for edgier times. It is a lament for a movement that has grown confused about its purpose and amorphous in its ideology. What was the gay and lesbian rights movement and is now an ever-extending Countdown conundrum – LGBTQQIP2SAA – has become a vehicle for gender identity theory and other postmodernist pabulum. Gender theory’s homophobic undertones are no longer under and no longer just tones: same-sex attraction is being re-closeted as ‘transphobia’ and young gays and lesbians encouraged to change their gender rather than accept their sexuality.
In the ultimate betrayal of the gay rights movement, steeped in liberationist and civil libertarian politics, the Pride flag has come to represent a thoroughly intolerant, authoritarian tendency. The gender identitarians are not interested in liberation or equality or tolerance. They demand affirmation – submission. They are in the business of both compelling and suppressing speech, of threatening the livelihoods and reputations of dissenters, of disrupting their opponents’ ability to peaceably assemble, of politically and socially ostracising those who think differently. The most insufferable moralising fusspots out there today are no longer little old Mary Whitehouse clones with their blue rinses and their bibles but green-haired sociopaths who hallucinate boomer feminists as Nazis and themselves as the partisans. No pasarán, gran.
Gender identity ideology has not only annexed the political space once occupied by gay rights, it has confirmed the triumph of postmodernism over materialism on the left. Progressives have been convinced that certain groups can simply identify themselves out of oppression. Erstwhile rationalists have embraced in self-identification a secular doctrine of transubstantiation in which ‘the power of the blessing prevails over that of nature’. Counter-revolutionaries are denounced with a zeal that would make the Red Guards blanch. Consider the treatment of Kathleen Stock, a gutsy feminist philosopher who almost gives academics a good name. She is brilliant, fearless, erudite, witty – but unfailingly calm. It’s like someone gave Camille Paglia a Valium. Yet this impeccably progressive woman is demonised as a reactionary for her belief in biological sex.
Meanwhile, actual reactionaries have forged a mutually beneficial relationship with the gender identitarians. They feed off each others’ extremism. They exploit their opponents’ bogeyman status to accrue power and following on their own side. They share a commitment to making political discourse more vulgar and public policy more harmful. They are as one in their disdain for compassion and moderation. It’s not obvious what Pride or the LGBT movement has done for gays and lesbians lately but they’ve done wonders for the careers of Matt Walsh and Ron DeSantis. In their alliance with political and corporate power, and their petty authoritarianism, they have given the illusion of vindication to the old Bob Hope gag: ‘I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.’
Pride has come far from its beginnings and but it has also strayed from that spirit of Stonewall which it claims to carry on. Stonewall was an uprising. It was not an accommodation with power, it was a direct challenge to power. Pride has lost its focus and its purpose, knocked off course by a successor ideology headed for its own destination. Like the Stonewall Inn, Pride made history but that history has long since left it.
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