The first weekend in June, armed with a KN95 mask and lots of water, I walked through the Gayborhood in my hometown of Philadelphia with my best friend, running into old pals, kids I used to babysit, one of my cousins. The weather was gloriously temperate, and the streets were flush with queer and trans people as far as we could see. But as we rounded corners clogged with pedestrians, we were met with armed police officers.
Here at Teen Vogue I’ve written seemingly countless words about the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ hate and legislation over the last few years — and I’ve spent the last few months feeling ambivalent about Pride Month’s approach. I think in lists now, a web of stories connected by death and violence and bigotry.
Over the last year, I’ve woken up Mondays to start the workweek and logged on to cover the Club Q shooting; the killing of trans 16-year-old Brianna Ghey; the police killing of trans climate activist Tortuguita, 26; the pain of cultural workers in states like Tennessee as legislatures try (and, for what it’s worth, often fail) to censor us; the targeting of Black and trans elected officials facing censure and harassment while trying to navigate the system as we’re told we should; and most recently, a group of more than 20 neo-Nazis targeting a drag story hour for kids that had, maximum, 12 attendees.
It's a scary time to be LGBTQ+. I understand feeling unsafe or unable to measure your safety right now, because we’re living through the rapid crumbling of whatever false sense of safety America's queer and trans people gained through the nonprofit co-optation of our struggles, from the AIDS epidemic to marriage equality; a form of Pride that them editor Samantha Allen aptly called “plastic.”
Target’s Pride collection had been an opportunity for lighthearted intracommunity ribbing over its cringier items — until the company’s cowardly rollback became a reminder of the empty fragility of rainbow capitalism. Twitter used to be where I caught up on queer discourse and in-fighting; now it’s where Elon Musk called “cisgender” a slur and its repeated usage a suspendible offense.
It helps to know that we will survive this period. It’s not all doom and gloom. A friend asked me to explain Moms for Liberty’s whole schtick, and the easiest answer was just boring old Anita Bryant.
Our enemies aren’t creative or smart. We’ve seen and survived it all before, as maintained by writer and historian Hugh Ryan, who has suggested a mode of “queer indifference” to handle this overwhelming moment and the ensuing media spectacle. But that doesn’t mean our fear — of losing hard-won access to health care, threats to our survival — isn’t real or valid.
In tandem with the anti-LGBTQ+ push, there's been a backlash to the abolitionist uprisings of 2020. These events are connected, and that connection is perhaps never so clear as when symbolized by a heavily armed, uniformed cop amid a queer celebration. The ever-capacious police state is selling the wrong solutions to desperate people who seek safety, so I was disappointed but not surprised to see police lining Philly’s Gayborhood.
“In a heavily armed, militaristic, misogynist, and racist society, people are justifiably scared of violence…." wrote abolitionist Dean Spade nearly a decade ago, in the 2014 anthology Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Just Inclusion. "The idea that we are in danger rings true, and the message that law enforcement will deliver safety is appealing in the face of fear.”
If the browbeating of corporate Pride was a wake-up call for you, go a step further to realize that a system that holds back countless of our numbers is innately inhospitable to our survival. So I’m taking the opportunity to remind us, as Teen Vogue contributors have twice before, it's still “No cops at Pride.”
The simplest path to the root of this phrase is that Stonewall, in 1969, was a riot over police brutality. In the 2011 anthology Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, academic Eric A. Stanley wrote that though Stonewall was not the first instance of queer and trans “radical refusal of the police state” — earlier examples include the 1966 riots at San Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria and, in 1959, at Los Angeles’s Cooper’s Doughnuts — Stonewall was chosen by LGBT political organizations to be the “birth of the gay rights movement,” the beginning of an “arc of progress” concluding with marriage equality, hate crimes legislation, and gay participation in the military.
As Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade wrote in the opening chapter of Captive Genders, “Instead of trying to change the system, the official LGBT agenda fought to just be welcomed into it, in exchange for helping to keep other oppressed people at the bottom.”
But as Against Equality asserted through multiple interlocutors, those assimilationist projects could only ever get us so far. They were never intended to protect us; they cannot offer us protection.
As noted by journalist Liliana Segura in that 2014 anthology, “It is only recently that the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ didn’t itself amount to criminal activity in the eyes of the law,” with anti-sodomy laws just overturned by the Supreme Court in 2003. Segura continued, “Trans and gender-nonconforming people, particularly trans women of color, are regularly profiled and falsely arrested for doing nothing more than walking down the streets.”
That web of stories I mentioned before is sprawling. If you look at the suppression of our communities, you will find the marks of policing at every step. Consider how the killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, in January, was by a policing unit launched by a former Atlanta deputy police chief; and that, while in Atlanta, she presided over a similar unit that was disbanded after a 2011 raid on a gay bar. At the time, that incident was compared to Stonewall.
Consider, too, how Atlanta police killed 26-year-old Tortuguita while raiding a Cop City protester encampment; how police are pressing terrorism charges against protesters, including a trans woman who lost access to her full hormone dose while jailed for two weeks.
Consider how Tennessee has, writ large, sought to be at the forefront of homophobic and transphobic policy.
Consider how 24-year-old Banko Brown, an unhoused Black trans man, was killed in San Francisco, in April, by a Walgreens security guard; how Walgreens claimed it had closed stores over “retail theft,” and then admitted that statement was overblown. Consider how overstated claims of unruly crime, and what advocates have called out as bail reform misinformation, helped justify the election of Brooke Jenkins as the city’s district attorney; and how Jenkins then declined to press charges against Brown’s killer.
A new foreword to Captive Genders was written by CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman and organizer who was incarcerated in a men’s prison for 19 months after attempting to protect herself from a transphobic attack in 2011. The introduction to the anthology opens with a quote from movement foremother Sylvia Rivera, who was present at Stonewall: “We always felt that police were the real enemy.” Miss Major, a fellow Stonewall veteran who’s still an active advocate for trans lives, released a video in honor of Pride in 2019, reminding us that police have no place in the celebration.
Abolition as a necessity for queer and trans survival is obvious if you look and listen to the leaders who, throughout history, have enabled us to survive as long as we have — despite it all. As my predecessor Lucy Diavolo put it in June 2020, “Queer liberation — a future where LGBTQ people are free not just from discrimination, but from all the oppressive systems that hold everyone down — must include police abolition among its goals.”
The last weekend in June, I attended the New York City Dyke March. Cops were few and far between, but reminders of the fight to stop Cop City were scrawled on handmade signs. Looking around, I didn’t feel fear; I felt hope. The threats against us are real, but we’re stronger — and that’s especially true when we stand up for one another, instead of seeking protection from institutions built to harm us. No cops at Pride.
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