by tommi avicolli mecca

The spirit of Stonewall

IT'S ANOTHER PRIDE month.

Time to pull out the Queer as Folk baseball cap and put the rainbow flag in the window. Time to pick up the annual Pride Guide with its slick color ads from liquor companies and high-end fashion designers and jewelry makers. Nothing like a little crass commercialism to promote what started out as a street riot. June 1969: A routine raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, took an unexpected twist as queers fought back, forcing the cops to take cover in the bar and call for reinforcements. Three days of street actions followed, transforming the more staid homophile movement into a gay liberation struggle that forever changed how America looks at queers.

Thirty-six years later, on June 26 here in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of us will march up Market Street to the Civic Center area to commemorate those riots (though many marchers will never have heard of Stonewall). We'll walk around in endless circles, stopping at booths selling everything from rainbow flags and other Pride paraphernalia to beer, the American recreational drug of choice. When all is said and done, street cleaners will sweep away the abandoned banners and signs and the thousands of empty bottles and paper plates, the remains of yet another Pride day.

It's not what we envisioned in the early '70s when we organized those first gay pride marches, chanting as we hit the streets, "Two, four, six, eight, smash the church, smash the state." We weren't kidding.

These days, few of us want to smash either institution. Here in San Francisco's LGBT community, standard-issue marriage is all the rage. Middle-class gay men and lesbians buy tenancies in common (TICs), created by evicting working-class people (including people of color, seniors, and people with AIDS) from their homes. About 14 percent of people with AIDS are homeless, yet their plight doesn't generally make headlines the way that the latest chic AIDS fundraiser does. Transgender folks face a 70 percent unemployment rate. It's easy to be cynical.

Fortunately, not everyone wants to become the all-American queer couple next door living in a TIC with a lavender picket fence, an SUV in the driveway, and the credit cards maxed out. Not everyone is looking to be CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Some of us still believe in something other than making a killing in the stock market or going to Iraq and doing the Bush administration's bidding as an out queer soldier.

Two developments this past year give me hope that the spirit of Stonewall lives on in the Bay Area: the opposition of queers in Oakland to the creation of a gay business district and And Castro for All's pickets against Badlands, a Castro bar the San Francisco Human Rights Commission recently found guilty of discrimination against African Americans.

At a time when Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy define us in popular culture, some folks can see beyond TV's promotion of middle-class mediocrity to a much bigger picture. They get that displacing working-class people for a gay business district is not only immoral but also creates resentment in poorer communities that often view us as a bunch of privileged upper-middle-class white men with healthy disposable incomes. They know that ending racism is not merely a slogan but something to be put into action every day, even when it means challenging one of our own institutions. They understand all too well, as Dr. Martin Luther King once said, that "none of us is free until all of us are free."

A perfect thought for any Pride day.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a longtime southern Italian radical queer activist who helped organize the first gay pride march in Philadelphia in 1972. He is currently a member of And Castro for All, the group organizing the pickets outside Badlands.