Nearly 57 years ago, LGBTI+ people rose up at Stonewall, rejecting the oppression and violence that defined their daily lives and raising their heads to confront the patriarchal order. Each Pride Month should remind us that every right we won has been achieved thanks to the tradition of struggle of LGBTI+ throughout history which reached a new quality by the resistance of Stonewall in 1969.
So what exactly happened at Stonewall?
On the 18th of June, 1969, the Stonewall riots erupted in New York. In response to a climate of severe repression, the riots‘ demands were to end the oppression of LGBTI+ people and the state’s complicity in that oppression. The police raided the LGBTI+ bar ‘Stonewall Inn’, but people resisted, and their resistance led to powerful riots. The Stonewall riots marked a new quality of the struggle for the liberation of LGBTI+ people in the USA and would eventually lead to the first Pride march.
Faced with heterosexist violence, capitalist exploitation, and often racist oppression, LGBTI+ people were left with only two choices: to silence their identity or to stand up and fight. Between the rise of fascism, the resurgence of patriarchal violence against women and LGBTI+ people, and the current crisis, it is urgent not only to reconnect with this tradition of struggle upon which all our hard-won rights rest, but also to reconnect with its revolutionary demands. This is all the more necessary when the bourgeoisie is trying to pacify LGBTI+ people by faking an interest in them during Pride Month. The façade does not help to hide the exploitation of the entire working class.
The bourgeois instrumentalization of the LGBTI+ struggle will always be denounced. They justify racist violence in order to “protect women and homosexuals” and try to instrumentalize the struggle against patriarchy to continue their genocidal and imperialist politics. From Palestine onto our neighborhoods. We don’t need your pinkwashing.
Faced with this situation, there’s no point in asking the bourgeoisie to stop using the struggle of some oppressed people to attack others; we will not ask, we will seize it, we will represent ourselves, and we will raise our own flag — the flag of liberation for all!
Stonewall is our revolutionary tradition: self-defense, class struggle, women and LGBTI+ liberation !
Only a world without oppression, only a word without capitalism, will free us all. LGBTI+ fight for socialism, LGBTI+ womensrevolution!