‘Pride’ and protests
LGBTQ leader: Liberation fight begun by Black & Brown people
They’re bringing Pride back to its roots.
This week, members and friends of the LGBTQ community will mark 52 years since a series of violent demonstrations at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village ignited a new era in the fight for queer rights.
Pride events, both virtual and in-person, will celebrate the incredible progress achieved by the community over the past five decades, while also preparing for battles ahead.
As the nation still struggles to reemerge from a soul-crushing pandemic, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people have to deal with a different set of threats.
They include no federal protection against discrimination, a record number of newly enacted anti-LGBTQ laws, a high rate of anti-transgender killings and a staggering number of anti-LGBTQ bills under consideration in state legislatures — over 250, with more than half directly targeting the transgender community.
That’s why people should be “recentering Pride through the lens of activism,” according to Alphonso David (inset), president of the Human Rights Campaign.
While Pride is “certainly about celebrating LGBTQ identity, it’s also about making sure we raise our voices to advance our rights, and protect our rights,” David told the Daily News. That includes fighting for the rights of minorities within the larger LGBTQ community.
“Our quest for liberation as LGBTQ people is inextricably linked. We have to look at the world through an intersectional lens,” he said.
“I’m a Black man, I’m a gay man, and I’m an immigrant,” said David, 50, who was born in the U.S. but moved to Liberia when he was 1. “And in this country, we create hierarchies of identity, where one identity is more important than the next. And we know that if you’re a racial minority, if you’re an LGBTQ person, if you’re an immigrant, you usually fall to the bottom of the totem pole.”
David, who spent 12 years working for Gov. Cuomo, beginning when Cuomo was the state attorney general, is the first person of color to serve as president of the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ rights organization. He took the job in 2019, and the next year, the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer helped change the trajectory of the LGBTQ rights movement.
“The unfortunate death of George Floyd and other Black people in this county hopefully reminded LGBTQ people that our fight for liberation was started by Black and Brown people. And that our fight for liberation is deeply rooted in the concept of protest,” David explained. “Pride started with protest. And the George Floyd killing reminds us of that.”
Despite the once-in-a-generation global health crisis, groups took the streets in unprecedented numbers last year to protest against racial inequalities and police brutality. Those demonstrations “should remind all of us that Pride started with protests, in that I cannot be free as a gay man if I’m not also free as a Black man,” said David. “Because if we’re only fighting for LGBTQ rights, and we disregard all of our intersections, then what we’re doing is ignoring a huge swath of the community, including me.”
In a video message marking the beginning of Pride Month on June 2, David urged the community to remember the revolutionary origins of Pride, “which started as a fight against police brutality” led by Black and Latina trans women.
The message was shared on Twitter just a few days after NYC Pride, the organizers of the city’s
Pride celebrations, announced that law enforcement officers are banned from participating in NYC Pride events until at least 2025.
“We have to also acknowledge that the LGBTQ movement has faced oppression from police for decades,” David said. “We can go as far back as Stonewall, where Black and Brown, transgender and gender nonconforming people, fought back against police violence, where they were being oppressed because they’re LGBTQ,” he told The News.
However, David added, “There are LGBTQ people who are police officers. These are LGBTQ people who have been fighting against discrimination in their inner ranks. And they have been fighting to make sure that they can be openly LGBTQ and serve as police officers.”
David hopes that this delicate balance can help the community in embracing Pride “as an inclusive space that recognizes all of us, and at the same time, advance our advocacy.”