“LGBTQ History Month” Ends, The True History Should Not
By Paul Samaha ’17
Some friends and I walking to the stadium at UC Berkeley on 11/31
I began this post as I embarked on the annual USC “Weekender”– a weekend-long trip where Trojans travel to the Bay Area for either the Stanford or UC Berkeley football game. This year we play Berkeley, and I’ll be staying in the heart of Downtown San Francisco: a beautiful metropolis in Northern California filled with free spirits and views of the sparkling San Francisco Bay. This same city is also where my past LGBTQ community members shed their blood, sweat, tears and in the worst case, their lives for the sake of basic human rights. Let’s dive in.
The LGBTQ movement has come a very long way in recent years. And while there is a lot more progress to be made, it is vital that we remember the leaders and martyrs who began the movement for many of the rights we experience today. In a pop culture world where many consider the LGBTQ community to embody the commercial party life of West Hollywood, and where major movie studios create false representations of our history and label them as truth, we must get back to the core of the movement and be properly educated on who got us here. Contrary to what mainstream media tells us, such as the film Stonewall that premiered with justified criticism and boycotts over the summer, the leaders behind the beginning of the LGBTQ movement were not all middle-class, cisgendered white men. This representation of our history is a falsehood, an edited and whitewashed version of our community’s history in attempt to remove the true heroes.
Former San Francisco State Assemblyman Willie Brown
By 1950, the Castro District in San Francisco was the nation’s first gay neighborhood, due both in part to the “white flight” to suburban neighborhoods and the thousands of American soldiers that were discharged from the military because of their sexuality; after being discharged in San Francisco, many of them moved into the Castro District where they could build a community together. In 1975, California became the first state in the U.S. to legalize homosexuality. The bill that allowed this was lobbied and authorized for by the black San Francisco State Assemblyman Willie Brown. This is a feat that is often left behind when telling this story of LGBTQ rights in America. Two years later, Harvey Milk was elected San Francisco City Supervisor, making him one of the few openly homosexual elected officials at the time. One year later in 1978, Harvey Milk was murdered, leading to the 30,000 Castro citizens taking the streets in remembrance, later turning into the famous White Night riots. The nearby city of Berkeley (update: where the Trojans victoriously beat Cal on Saturday!) became the first city to allow domestic partnership benefits from city employees. The list of historic triumphs and lives lost in San Francisco for the LGBTQ cannot be summarized to a paragraph, and would be best suited for a trip to the GLBT Historical Society Museum in the Castro District. If you want to make the trek back up to SF to do some more history searching, please let me know– I’m already itching to go back!
Human Rights Campaign Action Center and Store in the Castro District
We have reached marriage equality in 2015, and that is a beautiful thing. But this is by no means the end of a movement, it is simply a step in the right direction. If this was the end of a movement, it wouldn’t be legal to discriminate or fire an employee in some states because of their sexual orientation. If this was the end of a movement, there wouldn’t be 22 trans women, mostly of color, who have been killed thus far in the year of 2015 alone (compared to 14 killed in 2014). If this was the end of a movement, queer couples wouldn’t be fighting for the right to adopt a child. If this was the end of a movement, it wouldn’t be punishable under the law in cities such as Louisiana to lay in bed with your lover of choice. The list goes on. Therefore, the movement must go on.
The historic Castro District in San Francisco (Getty Images)
October is LGBTQ History Month, and the month has come to an end. The truth of our community’s history should never come to an end. We cannot bite the hands of the leaders who have helped to feed us our rights. It is the moment that we as an LGBTQ community forget who brought us here that we become the oppressors, no longer the receivers, of discrimination.
