As we enter into Pride Month with this special issue devoted to both celebrating the LGBTQ+ community and highlighting the barrage of threats against LGBTQ+ people from those on the right, tracking those threats has often seemed overwhelming. The onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation from state lawmakers across the country has been so fast and furious that we’ve had to update the list of repressive bills multiple times during our production process just to keep up.
But those on the right have underestimated the joy, resilience, and tenacity of the LGBTQ+ community. Resistance is nothing new for this community and its allies.
This year is the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which followed a police raid on Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn and is considered the catalyst for Pride celebrations and the modern-day LGBTQ+ rights movement. But as historian Julio Capó Jr. points out in a 2017 article in Time magazine, Stonewall didn’t “happen in a vacuum.”
Eighty-five years ago, in November 1937, some 200 Ku Klux Klan members raided La Paloma nightclub in what is today Miami-Dade County, Florida, to attack its gender- and sexual-nonconforming staff and clientele. As Capó relates, “In the end, these raids, and several that occurred before and after, proved ineffective in silencing queer voices and experiences.” He adds, “Although wildly different, the reason the events at Stonewall and La Paloma share some general overlapping threads is that queer joints have historically been key sites of resistance, change, and even revolution.”
Today, the white robes and hoods worn by those who attacked La Paloma have been replaced by the business attire of GOP lawmakers who follow an agenda set by a rightwing hate machine desperately trying to cling to power. Speak out against this madness, and those lawmakers will attempt to silence you in the name of “decorum,” as Democratic state Representative Zooey Zephyr, of Montana, describes in an interview with Norman Stockwell.
V. Jo Hsu peels back the layers of Republican efforts to transform colleges and universities into laboratories of conservative indoctrination. Republicans are following a three-part strategy targeting teaching, student services, and faculty employment by “attacking gender studies and critical race theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and academic tenure.”
Brynn Tannehill helps us understand these coordinated attacks against trans people, which Republicans have been planning for decades. Tannehill points to the Family Research Council’s 2017 Values Voter Summit, where Meg Kilgannon of Concerned Parents and Educators of Fairfax County, Virginia, laid out the plan of going after transgender people first: “If we separate the ‘T’ from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.”
Ruth Conniff notes, “Anti-LGBTQ+ attacks create a threatening environment for kids. But the good news is that the culture of kids themselves seems to be evolving to be more accepting and less bigoted. And if the Republican Party is moving in the opposite direction, it can only survive by suppressing the voice of the majority.”
Miranda Jayne Boyd shares what it’s like to be a queer, nonbinary person raised in a red state and what’s at stake if we don’t fight back: “The statistics are grim: Forty-five percent of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered suicide last year,” and “nearly one in five trans and nonbinary youth made an attempt. Conversely, people who have loving, accepting communities fare better.”
And Jesse Hagopian, in a piece highlighting the inextricable link between Black history and queer history, quotes the great women’s rights and civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
We would also like to extend a special thank you to Diana Cook, whose keen eye and sharp pencil proofread the pages of this magazine for a half-century. Diana began proofreading The Progressive in the spring of 1973—fifty years ago! “That nice round number,” she told us, “tells me that it’s time to hang up my green eyeshade and red pencil, and so I do.”
Diana’s skills kept us on the journalistic straight and narrow through decades that saw great challenges for print media. As this issue shows, The Progressive is as committed to equality and justice now as it was in 1973.
We will miss Diana and wish her the very best in her next adventures.