In the last weekend of June, hundreds of thousands of people will flock to Seattle to celebrate 50 years of continuous Pride celebrations. This year also marks 55 years since the Stonewall riots, the famed uprising that launched the modern queer rights movement.
These weighty milestones draw attention to the rich history of the trans, queer, lesbian and gay people in this country. They also bring to mind the apparent clash between contemporary festivities and past scenes of hardship, of a time when the right to be yourself had to be asserted against a backdrop of police repression.
Indeed, TV representation of queer people is at an all-time high in the decade since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. Corporations and brands now rush to produce rainbow logos and merchandise every June. A survey by the polling firm Gravity Research found that 78% of Fortune 500 executives were still planning on rolling out Pride month-related campaigns this year, despite a recent right-wing backlash.
The increase in commercial marketability is also echoed in the realm of political representation: The LGBTQ+ Victory Institute estimates at least 1,288 queer electeds hold office today; Seattle has had two white queer mayors in the last decade.
But both in the U.S. and across the world, the progression toward liberation has been extremely uneven within the community. Queer youth are still disproportionately likely to experience homelessness; a February 2024 survey published by the Washington Department of Commerce found that more than one in 10 unaccompanied homeless youth identified as LGBTQ+, while one in 25 were trans or gender expansive. Respondents stressed in interviews that these statistics were a significant undercount and that queer youth of color were more likely than straight and/or white youth to be homeless.
These disparities are also replicated in terms of economic inequality. In 2022, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reported that, while 68% of straight adults owned homes, only 52% of gay and bisexual men owned homes, while lesbians had a homeownership rate of 51%. Nationally, only 36% of transgender and gender-nonconforming people owned a home. Black and Latina trans women are also more likely to experience both poverty and direct violence than their cisgender and white counterparts.
This widening inequality within the queer community creates a sense of unease that undermines the very notion of a shared experience. After all, how can people who come from the same purported group have such drastically different experiences? Meanwhile, recent years have seen a rise in reactionary sentiments, such as conservative boycotts of brands like Bud Light, which lost an estimated $1.4 billion in sales after partnering with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a 2023 advertisement.
The Bud Light boycott points to a fundamental weakness in the popular representation of queer people: Increasingly, people interpret Pride and what it means to be LGBTQ+ through a prism of brands and marketing. This inclination presents a twofold danger of flattening the queer community into caricatures and of limiting the possibilities of who we can imagine ourselves to be.
This is where I find the act of studying history to be so powerful. So much of what we encounter today was faced before by our elders and ancestors in the queer liberation movement.
A diversity of political currents
When we read queer history, we also learn that there have always been varying political currents within the queer community and clashing opinions about how to best fight for liberation. Some activists have stressed the importance of mainstream recognition and acceptance, while others eschewed conformity. Several LGBTQ+ organizations recognized the importance of joint struggle along the lines of race, class and gender, while others maintained an exclusive vision of fighting solely for queer rights.
Seattle is no exception to this complex history. In 1966, middle-class, white gay men founded the Dorian Society, the first explicitly “homophile” organization in the city, which advocated for the repeal of discriminatory laws. One of the group’s primary methods was to represent gay men in the media as respectable, good citizens, just like straight people.
One year after the Stonewall uprising, the Seattle chapter of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was formed. The national group was established shortly after the riots and had a very different perspective from the Dorian Society on how to achieve freedom. The GLF collaborated with contemporaries like the Black Panther Party and included membership of Black and Latina trans women like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.
I find the story of Seattle gay activist Feygele Ben Miriam particularly interesting. In the early ’70s, Ben Miriam was active with the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), an organization that mainly focused on rights of queer men. Yet he also joined some GLF-led protests, showing how porous the boundaries between different groups in the movement were. In an oral history collected by the Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project, Ben Miriam recalled that early activists were not afraid of raising a ruckus to be heard.
“We shouted out things,” Ben Miriam said. “I remember picketing City Hall one day, which was not far from where I worked. I took a long lunch, and I went down and joined the picket line.”
Ben Miriam said the case of Diego Viñales, an Argentinian undocumented immigrant who was swept up in a police raid of a gay bar in New York in 1970 and was subsequently impaled by a metal fence while trying to escape, illustrated how different groups approached the intersection of immigration justice and homophobia.
“But that’s where some of the differences between GLF and GAA surfaced,” Ben Miriam said. “GAA was single-issue; GLF was multi-issue, all liberations.”
He also became something of a trendsetter; in 1971, Ben Miriam and his then-partner Paul Barwick became the first people to apply (and be rejected) for a same-sex marriage license in King County.
Queer activists participated in many civil rights struggles, including advocating for Seattle’s fair employment ordinance in 1973 and successfully campaigning against its repeal in 1978. The Seattle Police Department (SPD) was known to have a payoff system at the time, where, in order to operate, owners of gay bars offered cops bribes and bouncer jobs. Gay and lesbian activists cooperated with federal agents in sting operations to expose SPD’s corruption.
On a national scale, the emergence of the gay rights struggle coincided with protests against the Vietnam War. As JSTOR Daily writer Matthew Willis documents, these anti-war demonstrations featured some of the first visible contingents of out gay men and helped define the fledgling queer liberation movement.
“[A]ntiwar politics brought gay liberation out of the political closet,” Willis wrote.
The focus on joint struggle organizing continued well into the 1980s. To commemorate the 15-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, Seattle Pride organizers adopted a 12-point platform calling for, among other things, “an end to homophobia, sexism, racism, classism and ageism” and the redirection of “U.S. tax dollars away from military buildup and back into the social services.”
As AIDS became a full-blown emergency, new groups like ACT UP formed to end the stigma around the disease, launching a grassroots sexual health education campaign, providing mutual aid and holding dramatic direct actions to call attention to the devastation of the epidemic. Faced with state neglect and demonization from the right wing, queer people had to create their own networks of care to survive.
Nonprofits established during the crisis, like Seattle’s LGBTQ Center, still serve queer and trans people today, providing free STI screenings, gender-affirming care and peer mentorship. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and Mpox outbreak, these groups sprung into action once again to fill in the gaps where governments failed to adequately respond.
Radical activism amid recognition
The devastation of the AIDS epidemic touched everyone in the queer community. In King County alone, 3,276 people — the vast majority of whom were queer men and trans women — died from AIDS-related complications between 1983 and 1996. Ahmoy L., a member of the anti-imperialist organization Sông2Sea and a passionate student of queer history, said the AIDS crisis marked a turning point in the queer community.
“If you are going to understand anything about queer history here in the United States, you have to look at the AIDS crisis,” Ahmoy said. “The ’60s and ’70s was a time of radical protest and queerness as well. … People really felt like things were getting better for queer trans people … and Black folks as well with the Civil Rights Movement. It was a time of fighting really hard with revolutionary optimism.”
In the wake of the crisis, Ahmoy said the queer liberation movement polarized around two groups. On the left was a progressive camp that wanted to focus on the fight for universal health care and other socioeconomic rights, while on the right a conservative camp coalesced around the struggle for same-sex marriage and assimilation into heteronormative society. In the end, the latter group won out.
But even as the mainstream political trajectory of the queer liberation movement bent toward legal equality and integration, many voices called for a different approach. In his 2011 book “Normal Life,” Seattle legal scholar Dean Spade wrote that trans people cannot achieve true freedom without addressing poverty, criminalization and the underlying structures of capitalism and prisons that enable them.
In the early 2010s, Spade and other Seattleites formed the Seattle chapter of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA), a grassroots collective that protested against Israel’s military occupation of Palestine and its impacts particularly on queer Palestinians. Activists with QuAIA popularized the term “pinkwashing” to refer to the use of pro-LGBTQ+ attitudes to cover up human rights abuses and exploitation. This framework has since been applied to a number of other contexts, including corporate brands for trying to “rainbow wash” their image. This history of queer anti-war activism has only intensified since the start of the War on Gaza, with many proclaiming the slogan of “no Pride in genocide.”
In Seattle, the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising against police brutality resurfaced longstanding unease between the queer community and SPD, with many organizers becoming deeply involved in the Defund SPD movement. Citing the long history of cops participating in the criminalization of queer people, Seattle Pride banned SPD officers from participating in the main Pride parade while in uniform in 2022. These concerns were reaffirmed in January of this year when SPD officers participated in Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board inspections of several high-profile gay bars in Capitol Hill.
Additionally, organizations like the Seattle-based Lavender Rights Project are a reminder that this mantle of radical queer activism has been spearheaded by Black, Brown and Indigenous trans and queer community members. Building on the lineages of Black trans activism, in fall 2023, the group launched a campaign called “We are family, too” to uplift Black trans people and highlight their important role in the Black community.
For Ahmoy, learning about people like the butch lesbian activist Rita “Bo” Brown, who took up arms in the 1970s to wage a guerrilla campaign against the state as part of the George Jackson Brigade in Seattle, helped reshape his view of what community safety looks like. When he attends events like Trans Pride, Ahmoy said he is thinking of all the hidden labor of countless organizers who take community safety into their own hands. He hopes the new generation of queer people who are becoming politicized take the time to study their history.
“I’m excited for us to figure out different systems to take care of each other,” Ahmoy said. “I’m excited for us to wrest control of this narrative. The radical queer movement is here and it’s only going to get bigger. But something I want from this movement is an understanding of history so that we don’t, as you said, try to reinvent the wheel.”
While this is a brief summary of Seattle’s history of queer radical activism, my hope is that it extends an invitation to amplify the narratives of many queer people throughout history who have defined their identity in tandem with the wider struggle for freedom. In studying these histories, we gain agency to choose how we are represented, who we choose to memorialize and what we want to be remembered for.
As queer people, we do not have to accept the marketable depictions of who queer people are that brands try to present as truth. Let us remember that there have always been queer people engaged in resistance and the struggle for liberation.
Guy Oron is the staff reporter for Real Change. He handles coverage of our weekly news stories. Find them on Twitter, @GuyOron.
Read more of the June 26-July 2, 2024 issue.