Corporate, Queer-Ass Individualism
By: Alex Mell-Taylor
Tags: LGBTQ, Pride, Corporations, Queer, Rupaul

The high amount of rejection queer people faced romantically, socially, and professionally meant that the rhetoric of self-acceptance became all the more important. The rallying cry for the queer community famously became pride or the belief that queer people should accept and express who they are publically. This emphasis on pride was because the state actively tried to suppress and shame queer people’s expression, and so a movement was born to combat that shame. As one of the original organizers of this movement remarked in an interview with The Allusionist in 2015:

“People did not have power then; even now, we only have some. But anyone can have pride in themselves, and that would make them happier as people, and produce the movement likely to produce change.”

We now celebrate pride month every June to commemorate the Stonewall Riots of 1969, which was one of the first well-known examples of anti-police resistance from the LGTBQ+ community. On June 28 of 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn in New York City. The police very publically detained people on the street outside, and this garnered public attention that in the end, triggered both violent and peaceful demonstrations which lasted over six days. At the height of the riots, thousands of demonstrators showed up in solidarity.

Before this incident, it was not uncommon for the police to raid queer venues and arrest the patrons there. There were other queer groups long before Stonewall, but the response from the LGBTQ+ community to these incidents was usually muted. Groups like the Mattachine Society, still raw from events like the Lavender Scare, often operated in secret and relied heavily on respectability politics when appearing in public. These groups self-policed their members and demanded things such as dressing in formal attire for demonstrations. As activist John O’Brien remarked on his involvement with the group:

“We wore suits and ties because we wanted people in the public, who were wearing suits and ties, to identify with us. We [didn’t] want to come on, you know, wearing fuzzy sweaters and lipstick, you know, and being freaks. You know, we wanted to be part of the mainstream society.”

The Stonewall Riots signaled a shift in the opposite direction. Demonstrations would no longer be exclusively kowtowing to heteronormative power structures but resisting them. Within a year, a commemorative march was organized in New York City, and this event was not constrained by dress or formal attire.

This effort spurned the previous strategy of appealing to authority. The beginning of the equality movement was heavily influenced by anti-authority grassroots organizing. The NYC Stonewall march of 1970, for example, (called the Christopher Street Liberation March for the street the Stonewall Inn was on) was organized, in part, by bisexual activist Brenda Howard, who is sometimes referred to as The Mother of Pride. Unpaid, she organized many protests in the feminist and anti-war spaces.

Similarly, the rainbow flag that has become the icon of queer rights was never copyrighted. Creator Gilbert Baker purposefully left the symbol in the public domain so it could belong to everybody.

There has been a backlash in recent years against the perception that pride has moved away from its more activist roots. The modern meme The First Pride Was A Riot is a rallying call for the LGBTQ+ community to focus less on corporate sponsorships, and more on civic engagement and political resistance.

This narrative, however, belies the reality that there has always been a tension in the queer community between pushing the envelope and assimilating into the dominant, heteronormative culture. The Mattachine Society of the 1950s was all about “seeming normal,” and even as parts of the queer community grew bolder following the Stonewall Riots, there were other groups that just wanted to “fit in.” While the first Christopher Street march in NYC may have been more political, the corresponding Christopher Street West march in West Hollywood, LA had a more celebratory tone from the getgo.

The thing that bound these two disparate factions was the rhetoric of self-acceptance. The rejection queer people endured from society meant that the movement itself had to overcompensate. Members needed to find ways to love themselves in the absence of societal acceptance. From the 70s roughly to now, the language of the queer movement has been uncompromising, and unapologetic. Popular LGBTQ+ memes such as Born This Way, We’re Queer. We’re Here. Deal With it, as well as many more, have all essentially amounted to a campaign of visibility and acceptance that has made self-expression paramount to the movement’s very identity. Queer people needed to first be unashamed in who they were to push for social change.

As the mere existence of queerness became less taboo, some businesses saw an untapped market in facilitating that self-expression for profit.