Queer Liberation: The Social Organization of Forgetting and the Resistance of Remembering
The first lesbian and gay rights demonstration on Parliament Hill, August 28, 1971. Photo courtesy of Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives.
For me one of the most exciting aspects of queer liberation was the recovery and remembering of our complex histories of resistance to oppression. Unfortunately, in much of the Left and within gay/lesbian communities our rich queer histories of struggle have been forgotten, creating a kind of social and historical amnesia. This forgetting has become one of the ways that a middle class, white, largely male, and moderate politics has been resituated at the heart of current gay/lesbian organizing that both moves us away from the radical roots of our struggles and towards accommodation with oppression and exploitation.
The Stonewall riots of 1969 are not often remembered as a major rebellion against police repression leading to the formation of Gay Liberation Fronts that were named partly in solidarity with the Vietnamese National Liberation Front then fighting against U.S. imperialism. Instead, Stonewall has become the occasion for celebrating a limited commercialized and commodified gay (and to some extent lesbian) culture during Pride events.
The rest is at this Canadian Dimension site:
http://canadiandimension.com/articles/3103/