The Coronavirus Pandemic Returned Pride Month to Its Radical Roots | Bitch Media
▻https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/pride-returns-radical-roots
Even the Gay Liberation Monument, a West Village sculpture commissioned on the 10th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, is a sanitized commemoration of the events. It features two standing men and two sitting women whose features are traditionally white. All four figures are covered in white lacquer, a staple of the artist George Segal’s work. In this sanitized version of Pride, there’s no room for outliers. There are no Black drag queens with broad smiles and flower-crowns balanced precariously, like Marsha P. Johnson; no biracial androgynous lesbians wearing tuxedos with close-cropped hair, like Storme DeLarverie; and no curly-haired Latinas carrying Molotov cocktails with gender identities too fluid to be contained, like Sylvia Rivera. In this version of Pride, the one co-opted into commercials and storefronts, there’s no space for the queer people who don’t fit neatly into the expectation of normalcy, gays who aren’t pining for a prepackaged wedding and the evolution of our marriage into 2.5 kids and a one-car garage in suburbia.
But 2020 isn’t a normal Pride or even a normal year. Many of us spent our spring cooped up, hearing sirens scream as they carted bodies to overfilled hospitals without enough ventilators. Those of us in quarantine haven’t seen our friends and families for months, separated from contact with other humans by six feet and masks that cover half of our faces. As a result, the expected public celebrations of Pride were canceled, and no one was exactly sure when things would return to normal. The appeal of crowding onto dance floors or the crushing flow of other queers diminished, replaced instead by existential terror about catching or spreading the illness. But then Breonna Taylor’s murder at the hands of Louisville, Kentucky, police officers as they executed a no-knock warrant on her home in the middle of the night came to the national spotlight. And then Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd, kneeling on his neck for more than eight minutes while he cried out for his dead mother. And then white America finally took to the streets to join the Black Lives Matter movement in demanding that racist police stop killing Black and Brown people.