Each summer, Lab/Shul hosts an intern from the Collegiate Leadership Internship Program. Our current intern, Sylvie Nelson, shares her response to marching with the Queer Liberation March and the complexities of Pride in 2020.
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Pride was something that was just accepted. My friends had gay parents, my family gave my sister and me the spiel of “we accept you no matter what,” and I first went to San Francisco pride at 13, long before I knew I was queer. My first memories of Pride are of glitter, dressing up, Dykes on bikes, and the picture my mom has of me still up on her Facebook: hair straightened, grinning and awkward in my own body, and holding up a Hedwig and the Angry Inch condom. When I came out at 15, it was easy. Yes, there were tears on my part, but my parents were completely accepting and caring. They made sure I knew I was loved, connected me with queer family members, and over the years have gotten used to asking me if there are any guys OR girls I’m interested in. I never had to fight. I never had to hide. I just was.
My current relationship to the idea of “Pride” is an extremely complicated and ever changing one. If I had to use one emotion to describe this relationship, it would be “frustration.” How am I supposed to celebrate my identity and how I choose to love once a year, then go back to not discussing it? How am I supposed to celebrate when Pride is increasingly co-opted by corporations and heterosexual voyeurism? And I have been told that being queer cannot mix with other facets of my identity. I have been told not to fly a rainbow flag with a star of David on it out of fear of causing offense. And it hurts. It really hurts. Because how can the thing that makes me accept the different parts of myself be turned into a symbol of hate? So yes, as much as I jump at the opportunity to dress up, don rainbow, and take joy in who I am, I also am left with so many questions.
But this year, I really was excited. Since COVID made my internship remote, this would be my first opportunity to meet many of the Lab/Shul team in person. I didn’t have to worry about mixing my religion with my sexuality, because I was surrounded by a group of like-minded individuals, and this march wasn’t about corporations or partying as a means of acceptance. It was about uplifting Black Trans voices.
And for a while, Queer Liberation was strikingly beautiful and fully real. The possibility of freedom was laid out on the streets of 6th Avenue as people danced and sang, handed out food in the heat, and educated each other on the true meanings of queer liberation. I chanted. I ran into friends. I made friends. I got to speak and learn from members of the Lab/Shul and Judson team about what it means to be religious and queer. It was lovely, and sunny, and gay.
And then it wasn’t. I was in Washington Square Park when cops stormed in pepper spraying and arresting, doing their best to break up crowds. Completely by happenstance, I was on the other side of the park and left right as it began. I didn’t even know about it until friends texted me asking if I was safe later that day. I was and am extremely privileged. Because it is no coincidence that the one year that a Pride march is replaced with a Queer Liberation March to support Black Trans Lives is the year the cops decide to get violent.
The beauty and soul of yesterday should be a happy memory, but instead it is marked with anger and hurt. When I look at videos and pictures of what happened, my heart stops for a second and my skin goes hot.
The decades following the Stonewall Uprising have watched Pride – as a concept and as a movement – struggle. Been corporatized, capitalized upon and co-opted. Queer bodies have been used for monetary gain, twisted and appropriated in order to be palatable to the mainstream media. Queer people have fought for a seat at the table only to watch the seat awarded to whomever can blend into the mainstream. To whomever presents the whitest, the most cisgendered, the most conventionally masculine. It is a Pride that is reserved for the few.
I stand at a juncture unsure of the role my voice plays in this decades-long struggle. I am neither sitting at the table which rebukes my queerness nor am I pardoned from the culture of Pride which has stood on the backs of Black and Brown folkx without acknowledgement. My voice has been amplified, my experiences validated. My struggle as a queer woman has never been compounded by the color of my skin.
On Sunday, I stood in front of Stonewall, near the end of the march. People flocked around Stonewall, enjoying the loosened lockdown restrictions with frozen margaritas bedecked with glitter, seemingly worlds away from the violence of the NYPD at Washington Square Park, and even further from the Stonewall Uprising. It is the Pride that is reserved for the few.
That is not our Pride.
Not one of us is free until all of us is free. And we cannot rest until Black and Brown Trans folx can walk through the street without fear of being arrested or murdered. So I ask all of you to question what “Pride” as a concept means to you. To think about how you can work towards a world of anti-racism, defunding the police, and achieving true queer liberation. To think about what type of world you want to live in and how you can help make that a reality.Because it is on us to keep fighting. It is on all of us.
