By Chuck Colbert / TRT Reporter
The historical event that LGBT Pride celebrates this week was not about equality, let alone assimilation.
Rather, the Stonewall Rebellion was spontaneous uprising on June 28, 1969, at a New York City gay bar – a flare up between police and patrons that propelled the growth of the LGBT civil-rights and liberation movement.
In a word, Stonewall was a riot where societal outcasts – Puerto Ricans, drag queens, transgender persons,
other people with brown and black skins — fought back and pushed back against mainstream society’s oppression of them for being different.For decades since then, however, a winning strategy for the LGBT community has been one of assimilation — an attempt to fit into the mainstream by minimizing differences — with legislative and legal advances on everything from federal hate crimes protections, to repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” to marriage equality.
As just one local measure of progress locally, attorney John Affuso, the grand marshal of this year’s Pride parade, noted, fewer than 35 years ago, “Boston had [just] one out attorney, John Ward, representing people who had been arrested [for same-sex solicitation] in the Boston Public Library.”
Now, with openly-lesbian Justice Barbara Lenk’s confirmation to the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC), Affuso said, “We’ve gone from the Suffolk County Jail — the SCJ — to the SJC.”
Even the Boston Pride committee, with community input, selected a theme that suggests assimilation: “Equality. No more. No Less.”
But is assimilation — integration into mainstream society in accord with prevailing cultural norms — the end game of the LGBT movement?
“When I hear the word assimilation,” said the Rev. Irene Monroe, “I cringe.”
And yet Monroe, an ordained Baptist minister, writer, and theologian, was quick to embrace assimilation in one context.
“The only time I can see, for Christians, where we should assimilate is at the communion table when we say, ‘Take this, the body of Christ.’”
The question of assimilation raises other questions for Corey Yarbrough, executive director of the Hispanic Black Gay Coalition (HBGC),
“If we were to assimilate, what kind of society would we want to assimilate into?” he said. “How do we integrate into a mainstream that supports our movement to equality?”
HBGC is an organization for black, Hispanic, and Latino members of the LGBT community. Its website states: “We envision a world where LGBT individuals of color can unite to support and empower each other. We also envision a world where LGBT individuals of color can comfortably and unapologetically incorporate themselves into their racial/ethnic community and the mainstream LGBT community simultaneously.”
Affuso, Monroe, and Yarbrough offered their remarks during an official Pride event, The Equality Lounge, a panel discussion, held on Tuesday evening, June 7, at the Radisson Hotel Theatre Café.
The newly formed Human Rights and Education subcommittee of Boston Pride sponsored the dialogue, with 75 people in attendance.
“The Pride movement is relevant to human-rights activism,” explained Keri Aulita, deputy director of Boston Pride.
The educational forum, a first for the organization, is only the beginning of the Boston Pride’s efforts to be “active and present in the LGBT community year round,” she said.
Eastern Bank president Bob Rivers said he came for personal and professional reasons. “It’s one thing to be spiritually supportive [of the LGBT community],” he explained. “It’s another thing to be able to understand the issues well enough to be as supportive as you possibly can be,” Rivers added.
Attorney Rob Quinan served as moderator of the hour-long conversation, joined by Gunner Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, a panelist.
The equality forum came on the eve of a hearing before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary where state lawmakers on Wednesday, June 8, heard testimony on a transgender-rights bill.
In his remarks, Scott noted that in the fight for equal-marriage rights, transgender folks have been left behind. “We have not been fighting with the same fervor at the State House,” he said, referring to marriage-equality activism.
Meanwhile, for transgender people, safety concerns trump assimilation, Scott suggested. “The rise in hate crimes against those perceived to be LGBT wasn’t because they were holding hands but because of the way they looked,” he explained. “If you think about it, gender expression” explains why LGBT people have experienced “discrimination, harassment, and violence.”
Members of the audience also voiced concerns about assimilation.
“It brings to mind denying who I am,” said Donnell Graves. “I refuse to do that with my black [straight] friends, who want me to be heterosexual” or with “white gays who want me to be white, which I am not.”
Yet another apprehension: “As a bisexual, I don’t feel a part of this [LGBT] community,” one woman told the gathering. “I’ve received more discriminatory comments and just hateful questions and ignorance from gay and lesbian identified people than straight people,” she said.
A panelist commented that it might be the very fluidity associated with bisexuality that could turn off some lesbians or gays who are wedded to their “Kinsey 6” or “absolutely queer” conception of sexuality.
Even before the conversation began, Daniel Robinson said he came to the forum with some reservations about assimilation. “For me, LGBT families are on the forefront of the trend to assimilation,” he said. “But as a single queer person, I try to resist that temptation sometimes.”
Yet for all the qualms, some attendees offered other ways to reconsider the question of assimilation.
“It’s important for us to be true to ourselves, individually, to our political community, to our church and town communities and to maintain a responsible dialogue,” said James Geller, adding, “It’s a journey.”
Or as HBGC member Graves suggested, “We need to respect each other as human beings and respect our diversity,” he said. “Get out of your comfort zone. We are all in this together.”
