LGBTQ Breaking News Service

This month, hundreds of thousands of people around the world will join gay pride marches in cities big and small. In many cities, pride marches are controversial. In some – like Moscow – they are even banned. But for many people in North America, parts of Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, attending the local pride march has become an unremarkable ritual of summer.

There are still good reasons to march. Few countries around the world have robust protections for gay and transgender rights. And pride marches, the LGBTQ political rallies that take the form of exuberant, outrageous parades, often meet hostile counterdemonstrators.

But such expressions of pride have faced another sort of opposition: from within the queer and trans communities themselves. One reason is that gay and trans rights doesn’t describe a single, unitary political movement.

I am a historian of queer and trans politics. My research, together with that of James Steakley, Katie Sutton, Robert Beachy and many others, shows that there are several traditions of gay and trans activism. These traditions have not always gotten along. And some of them hate what pride is all about.

A history of multiple movements

Gay and trans rights movements are quite old. For more than 100 years, political groups have been fighting on behalf of same-sex desires, gender nonconformity and transition from one gender to the other – although the terms “gay rights” and “trans rights” are relatively recent inventions.

By the late 1800s, a movement that called itself “homosexual emancipation” formed in Germany. It boomed after World War I and flourished in the 1920s under the democracy that existed before the Nazis took over. The movement included people who called themselves “transvestites.” Were they alive today, many would probably use the term transgender.

From the beginning, gay and transgender activists split into a dizzying array of factions. All were in favor of greater legal and social tolerance for same-sex relationships. But beyond that narrow common ground, they were a political hodgepodge.

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Some were leftists. One prominent leader of a gay rights group was also an important player in Berlin’s communist party. Others were middle-of-the road, calling for the end of Germany’s law against sodomy but otherwise content with the status quo. There were even right-wing, explicitly racist gay rights activists.

The Nazi Party itself was zealously anti-gay. Once in power, the Nazis murdered thousands of men for the “crime” of male-male sex. Yet, the historical record shows that a small number of men quietly belonged to both the homosexual emancipation movement and the Nazi Party, though they were not open about their sexuality within the party. Historians are still debating the significance of homosexuality in the Nazi Party. The small faction of gay fascists lauded erotic relationships between manly, “Aryan” soldier types while loathing feminists, Jews and leftists.

As you might imagine, these different camps within the homosexual emancipation movement did not agree on lots of things.

A debate about discretion

One of their big disagreements was about discretion: Was it acceptable for same-sex couples and gender nonconformists to cavort in view of the straight public?

Fifty years before pride marches began, 1920s Berlin had a jumping nightlife of gay male, lesbian and transvestite establishments featuring clubs like the Eldorado – known for its cross-dressing wait staff – and dance palaces like the Magic Flute. There was even a yearly all-women moonlight cruise. The pre-Nazi government’s approach was live and let live.

Not all advocates of gay rights, however, liked this public culture.

One man, a self-professed gay Nazi, wrote that Berlin’s clubs were “insalubrious” places where people surrendered to their animal lusts, and that “the general public inevitably gets the impression that it” – that is, the gay rights movement – “is all about sex.” This man wanted to celebrate homoerotic comradeship, a spiritual love, as he described it, as well as a physical one. However, he wanted to celebrate this manly love with maximum discretion, and certainly not in public. He wrote: “What two men do in the barracks,” by which he meant the barracks of the Nazi Party militia, “is no one’s business.”

Such complaints were not limited to the far right. Moderate activists had their own doubts about the bars and dance halls. One leader of transvestites warned, “When we demand that the public acknowledge us, then we have the duty to dress and conduct ourselves publicly in an inconspicuous manner.” Transvestites were told to avoid gaudy accessories like costume rings or oversized earrings.

To admit that one was homosexual or a transvestite in public in the 1920s was to court serious social and legal consequences. Activists of that era probably could not have imagined that one day people would march in large groups down public streets celebrating their homosexual and transgender selves.

‘We’re here, we’re queer’

In 1970, activists organized the first pride marches to mark the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Those riots occurred the summer before when people fought back against a police raid of a queer bar called the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village.

Pride exploded the old worries about discretion when it arrived in cities around the world in the 1970s.

Pride reveled in gaudy accessories. It had lots of scanty dress, too, from drag queens in slinky gowns to shirtless dykes with political slogans scrawled in marker across their chests. By bringing the party – along with the politics – into the streets in broad daylight, pride fought against homophobia. At the same time, it flatly rejected the old fears about overt public displays.

“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” a favorite chant at pride, was not only directed at mainstream, straight society. It was also, in my opinion, an answer-back to the debate about discretion that had marked the long history of gay and trans activism.

More debates about pride

By the 1990s, pride marches had run into more controversy within activist circles. They were criticized as too commercial, too male-dominated, too devoid of a broader left-of-center political agenda and insufficiently inclusive of people of color – or indeed downright racist and Islamophobic. Alternative demonstrations cropped up, like Berlin’s Alternative Pride and New York City’s Dyke March. Debates about pride continue to this day.

Pride is in part what people make of it. A pride march can have a social justice agenda. Or it can have a pro-Trump agenda.

Yet pride’s history is a story of a radical break with right-wing and even middle-of-the-road gay and trans politics. Pride rejected respectability and discretion.

Traces of that history probably survive in your local pride march. Look for the people who are not worried about alarming the straights.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

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Laurie Marhoefer has received funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

A non-binary student, 12, was attacked at a school picnic just for displaying an LGBT+ rainbow flag.

Leo Hoffman was dragged along the ground and had water thrown on their head as they tried to wrestle back control of the flag which had been snatched by fellow students.

Florida police are investigating the incident and the school has suspended multiple people who were involved.

Leo and their friends had been enjoying the picnic at Seminole Middle School in Plantation on May 28 when they decided to display the flag.

A male student grabbed it and threw it in a trash can, Leo’s father Benjamin Hoffman told Bay News Nine.

Leo took it back and decided to wear it as a cape before it was snatched by the same student again, resulting in Leo being thrown to the ground.

Their sister, Ashleigh, posted a clip of the incident on Twitter with the caption: ‘This is a video of my little sibling Leo who is non-binary being drug to the ground, stomped on, and covered in water just for wearing a pride flag at school.’

The clip shows several students trying to intervene while some giggle and laugh at the unfolding scenes.

Mr Hoffman told Bay News: ‘Leo was frightened. Not so much for themselves but for their friends. Leo is very strong and would do anything to protect their friends.’

Ashleigh later tweeted again to thank ‘everyone who had called’ the school to complain about the video. She added that the school’s principal had ‘just let us know that the five main boys involved have been suspended and that they are pursuing a full investigation.’

Hoffman said didn’t want ‘to see someone’s kid expelled from school’ but he said: ‘you can’t lay your hands on another person’, adding: ‘It’s just not acceptable.’

The school is set to introduce an anti-bullying programme when the students return later in the year.

Pinellas County Schools Public Information Officer Isabel Mascareñas told WTSP: ‘The students’ behavior was inappropriate and unacceptable, and they were quickly disciplined. Pinellas County Schools does not tolerate this behavior.

‘Pinellas County Schools welcomes everyone, and we teach students to accept and respect others for who they are.’ she added. ‘The district values diversity and promotes inclusion.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

That’s just one piece of the city’s LGBTQ history Stuart Hinds tells. There’s also the nightlife of the 60s and the organization that distributed information for gay men and opened the city’s first gay community center, the Phoenix House.

• Stuart Hinds, curator of Special Collections & Archives at UMKC and curator of the Gay and Lesbian Archives of Mid America (GLAMA)

BRIEF

When Gov. Jared Polis announced the appointment of W. Eric Kuhn to the Colorado Court of Appeals, the governor highlighted that the appointment was made during Pride Month.

The announcement came Thursday. “With this announcement at the beginning of pride month, the diversity of the Court of Appeals is increased with the addition of their only LGBT judge,” Polis, who in 2018 became the nation’s first openly gay man elected governor, said in a statement.

Not so fast.

Kuhn, it turns out, will in fact be at least the second LGBT judge sitting on the 22-member court.

Judge Anthony J. Navarro is also a member of the LGBT community, as the governor’s office acknowledged by Friday. Navarro was appointed to the court in 2012 and is a former Colorado LGBT Bar Association board member.

On Friday the governor’s office sent out a corrected announcement, which said that with Kuhn’s appointment “the diversity of the Court of Appeals is increased with the addition of one of the only LGBT judges” on the court.

The court hears cases appealed out of Colorado district courts, and its own rulings are subject to review by only one other judicial authority in the state, the Colorado Supreme Court.

Kuhn’s appointment was occasioned by the retirement of Judge Diana Terry. He is a senior assistant attorney general in the Colorado attorney general’s office, serving most recently in the office’s Health Care Unit.

“Eric has been indispensable to the State since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, providing thoughtful and measured legal counsel on a wide variety of public health and constitutional issues,” Polis said in his statement.

Kuhn earned a bachelor’s degree from Colorado College in 1995 and a law degree from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law in 2006. He previously worked at the Law Offices of Bradley J. Frigon.

“FUGITIVES OF THE HEART” by William Gay (Livingston Press, 252 pages, $29).

Times are hard for the characters who populate William Gay’s “Fugitives of the Heart,” the last in a string of posthumous novels pieced together by his friends from an attic full of scenes Gay left behind. The writing in these fragments, as always with Gay’s work, was exquisite. For J.M. White, Sonny Brewer and the other writers who figured out how the scenes fit together, the effort was worth it, a forensic labor of love they feel even now for a writer who died in 2012. William Gay, they will tell you, was one of a kind; more precisely, he was a once-in-a-generation talent who could read the works of Mark Twain, William Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy, absorb what they were trying to do, then do it himself and make it his own.

“Fugitives of the Heart” is Gay’s homage to Twain. Yates, the protagonist, is just a boy when his daddy is killed, shot for stealing a side of meat from a neighbor in the hills of Tennessee. He’s Huck Finn in a different century, a boy of battered nobility and heart, hard around the edges and living off the land, whose only real friend is a Black man getting by on the margins of the segregated South. This is the rough South, the hills and hollows of Appalachia, where the Depression came early and never went away and people just do the best they can. Some of them, anyway. But maybe not Yates’ daddy, whose body is dumped from the back of a wagon by the man who caught him stealing from the smokehouse. The killer also leaves the side of meat: “If he wanted it bad enough to trade his life for it then it’s hisn.”

This is where the story begins, with a moment so cruel and unexpected that it is almost more than a boy can bear. But the mountains turn pretty in the spring — “a warm wind looping up from the south” — and Yates takes heart:

“He saw this early spring as a gift from the fates. A balancing of some cosmic scale. The scent of wildflower rode the winds, and he moved through this Edenic world with a newfound confidence. He began to think he might make it after all.”

In a postscript to “Fugitives of the Heart,” White writes about the first time he visited Gay and they were talking about Cormac McCarthy. Gay urged White to read McCarthy’s “Suttree,” and White reported that he was “blown away” — not only by McCarthy’s exquisite language, but by his ability, as White put it, “to make readers aware of events without ever describing them in the text.” It was an artful literary device that White could see in Gay’s own writing. When they talked about it, Gay smiled. The prototype, he told White, could be found in Faulkner’s “The Hamlet” — such had been Gay’s study of the craft, the literary art, that he detected in other writers and incorporated into his work.

He loved to talk about his favorites, almost to revel in his own admiration. His publisher, Joe Taylor of Livingston Press, recalls him as “one of the most humble writers I’d ever met,” and in “Fugitives of the Heart,” Gay lets his central character find words for his respect. Late in the novel, Yates, the boy, reflects on life with the Widow Paiton, an attractive neighbor who has taken him in, offering, in this cold and forbidding land, a warm place to stay:

“Nights by the fire she’d read to him Biblical tales. The stories of stern old prophets, their mad ravings She’d temper this with Twain, a chapter a night of Huckleberry Finn, Jim and Huck in a fix on the sunrimpled Mississippi.”

Ultimately, of course, “Fugitives of the Heart” is not “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” nor is it merely an echo set in another time. It is not as funny, for one thing. Its humor takes the form of irony, and while it is written in third person, not first, Gay has a gift for point of view, reflecting the world through the eyes of a ragamuffin boy, while still managing, as Twain did, to write in scenes that are lyrical and lovely — almost as if he were painting with words. But the portrait is dark. The interracial friendship at the heart of the story, which seems so promising at the start — flintier, perhaps, than the relationship between Jim and Huck, but a bulwark against a hard world — abruptly takes on the specter of betrayal. Redemption comes at a terrible cost, more in the form of authentic survival, and we are left with the unmistakable sense that this is the best Yates can hope for.

Or the rest of us, for that matter.

To read an uncut version of this review — and more local book coverage — visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.