Hi, hello, hi. So, as many of you may know, it is Pride Month in the US and in the majority of Canada. Not here for some reason, but most other places. And for Pride Month, I wanted to talk a little bit about queer history. I think that it's important to keep our history alive, especially given the fact that it's not really taught in schools. So the best way to keep it alive is to talk about it. So when I think of queer history, the first place that I think of starting at is the Stonewall riots, and talking about Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Before we get into this, I want to give a really hardy trigger warning. I'm going to be talking about homophobia, transphobia, police brutality, violence against the LGBT community, violence against trans women and drag queens. I just really want to make sure that you're prepared because this is a really heavy topic to be talking about. And I don't want to just say all this stuff and then, you know, you weren't ready. So this is your chance to click away or take a minute. And if you're ready, we'll continue. Let's start with what were the Stonewall riots or even what is Stonewall? So in the 1950s and 1960s, LGBTQ plus Americans faced an anti-gay legal system. Because of this anti-gay legal system, a lot of establishments wouldn't actually allow openly or visibly queer folk to enter. Those establishments that did allow openly queer or visibly queer folk were usually bars and clubs. The Stonewall Inn was one of the more popular bars in New York at the time. So given the anti-LGBT laws in place and the fact that most queer people were gathering at bars, especially Stonewall, police raids became kind of a regular thing that happened a lot. So really early one morning on June 28th, 1969, Stonewall Inn was raided by police. They raided the bar under the guise of busting the bar for selling liquor without a liquor license. But, you know, that wasn't the case, obviously. We know why they were there. But this time, things escalated further than they usually did. What happened was a police officer clubbed someone over the head. I don't know if it was a drag queen or if it was a lesbian woman. I have found two different stories online and I can't really figure out which one is the correct one. But someone was clubbed over the head when they were complaining that their handcuffs were too tight. Witnesses say that they saw the police sexually harassing women while they were frisking them. And even the regular protocol involved taking trans women to the bathroom to have them stripped down to show their genitals to find out if they were cross-dressing because if they were cross-dressing, then they would be arrested. And they would immediately like just anyone who seemed like they could potentially be cross-dressing would be arrested. It just, it was a really messed up situation. So, during this one particularly awful raid, folks were gathering outside and watching and the cops were dragging out employees, dragging out drag queens and being really rough with them. And, after handling them quite violently, they would shove them into police cars. And this time, members of the LGBTQ community retaliated. Among one of the first to retaliate against the police was Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha P. Johnson was a trans woman of color, a drag queen, and an American gay civil rights and transgender rights activist. The night of the ride, she was there celebrating her 25th birthday when the police came in and raided the place. As the story goes, she threw the first brick in the bar that broke the, I think it was like a mirror or something in back or a glass. And in the crowd of onlookers, her friend Sylvia Rivera, who was also a trans woman of color and an American gay and transgender rights activist, was among the first to retaliate against her police oppressors. So, these two women, among some other, were the ones who spearheaded the riots. And these riots actually lasted more than one night. They went on for a couple of nights and they spread to other neighborhoods within New York until basically all of New York was in an uproar. So, you might be wondering why are these riots relevant? Well, it was these riots that actually started the gay rights movement. It started momentum. People were angry and people wanted to be heard and they were fighting back. And in the year that followed, there was a whole lot that happened. So, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera co-founded the organization called Star, which stands for Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, I think. Their organization focused on helping homeless queer youth and young drag queens and trans women of color. Often facing homelessness themselves, whenever Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera could afford to stay in an apartment or stay in a hotel, they would often sneak in other homeless queer youth just to keep them off the streets and sometimes it would be up to like 50 people in one small space just to keep each other safe. So, they dedicated their lives to helping and protecting our community. And that wasn't the only thing that happened in the year following the Stonewall riots. So, a year after the Stonewall riots, there was a first gay pride march. I wouldn't call it a parade necessarily. And on top of that, there were also gay rights groups popping up in basically every major city in America. That sounds great, but the thing that really struck me about the first pride that I didn't even know for a long time was that a year after the Stonewall riots when there was a first pride march, not only were trans people put at the very back, but Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were personally asked not to march in the parade, which is mind blowing because these women, their actions, their bravery, their dedication, they're the reason why the gay rights movement was advancing, they built all of this momentum that the rest of the community was riding on. It's just, it was really striking to me to hear that they were asked not to march. And the reason why is because the gays at the time felt that trans people and particularly drag queens would make the rest of the community look bad and that nobody would take them seriously because of them. Now, why am I telling you all this and how does that tie into today's pride? Firstly, like I said, I think it's really, really important to keep queer history alive and to talk about the people who fought for our rights every year at pride. We should be hearing these names. We should know them. This should be taught in history classes actually, in my opinion, but that aside, I was really struck by that phrase that they make the rest of us look bad or people won't take us seriously because that's still something that people say today. I hear it within the trans community, like a lot of trans binary folk will think that gender non-conforming or non-binary folk make the rest of us look bad and people don't take us seriously because of them or the really masculine gay men will think that the superflamboyant gay men make the rest of the gay community look bad and they're the reason why nobody takes them seriously. Or even the LGB part of the acronym saying that the tea part of the acronym makes the rest of them look bad and makes everyone take the rest of them less seriously and they want to separate from us is just it's mind blowing to me that after all this time people haven't realized that supporting the LGBT plus community is not about conformity. It's about embracing diversity. Diversity doesn't mean that we pretend that we're all the same. It means that we accept the fact that we're not. If cis-head people are not going to take the LGBT community seriously because of someone who is gender non-conforming or someone who's pronouns change or someone who is extremely flamboyantly gay that person very likely was not going to take the LGBTQ plus community seriously to begin with. Targeting the flamboyant gay men or the non-binary individuals or any part of the LGBT community that's considered the most eccentric. It's the low-hanging fruit. It's the thing that they're pointing to to blame for their homophobia or their transphobia rather than looking inside themselves and actually just realizing that they're just being discriminatory. Like your support of other people should not be contingent on whether or not you could see yourself in them. It shouldn't be about people being like you and you only like them because they're like you. You should be able to respect people regardless of whether or not you see similarities between them and yourself. They're human beings. So I wanted to give you this bit of history because one it's important and again keeping the history alive by talking about it. It should be a part of pride to be discussing our history and to be remembering these strong trans women of color who fought for our rights. But two because we shouldn't be making the same mistakes again. I feel that support for the LGBT community whether it be intercommunity or from outside the community should be about fundamentally respecting other people's rights to be who they are and love who they love as long as between two consenting adult human beings. And it should be less about normativity and conforming and trying to appease cis-head people. We should stand together and recognize that acceptance of our community should be unconditional. Anyway, that's my personal opinion. That's something that I took away from this story and hopefully there's something in here for you. There's something maybe that you learned or something that you could share with someone or just something to reflect on this year at Pride. And that's it. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you have a great day and a great week and do you take care of yourselves. And I hope you have a safe and happy Pride this year. All right, thanks. Bye.