Fort Worth's Stonewall?

On the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the Fort Worth police and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission decided to raid a new gay bar in Fort Worth.

Now, a slight young man is in the hospital with severe head trauma, several other people were seriously injured and witnesses are decrying police brutality. Hard to believe that this is 2009. As reported in the NY Times last week,

Fort Worth’s police chief, Jeffrey W. Halstead, initially stood behind his officers, saying Monday that patrons had provoked the scuffle by making sexual gestures toward officers.

Ah, yes. The old "gay panic" defense. Because of course a bunch of gay guys in a bar are stupid enough to assault a policeman. Or somehow going to make a big strong policeman feel sexually threatened.

But as the week went on, Chief Halstead backed away from that stance. By Thursday, he had ordered an inquiry, suspended operations with the state beverage commission and promised to give police officers “multicultural training.” He declined a request for an interview.

Witnesses claim that no one was drunk, the kid with the head injury had a bottle of water, and despite requests for breathalyzer tests, the cops refused.

A columnist at The Dallas Morning News:

First, witnesses say the officers showed up ready to make arrests, their fists full of plastic zip-cuffs.

"They were hyped up. They were loaded for bear," said Todd Camp, a veteran journalist who was there celebrating his birthday with friends. "They were just randomly grabbing people, telling them they were drunk."

Camp told me he has been in bars during TABC/police "checks" before, "and it was never anything like this." Usually, he said, officers discreetly walk through, looking for anybody who has had too much. This was different.

"They were shoving patrons," Camp said, "asking, 'How much have you had to drink?' "

Maybe you can call that a difference in perception, a disagreement over the degree of aggressiveness on both sides.

But there are flat contradictions about how Chad Gibson was injured. The Dallas Voice reported Monday that Gibson is hospitalized with bleeding around his brain.

"He was taken down hard," said Camp, with "four or five" officers wrestling him to the floor inside the club.

Cellphone photos shot by patrons and posted to blogs show a person being held facedown by officers in a short hallway inside the club, then show a dent in the wall where his head was apparently banged.

But a Fort Worth police spokesman told me Gibson was injured outside , when he fell and struck his head because he was so drunk.

"He was the one that groped the TABC agent," said Sgt. Pedro Criado. "He was injured by falling and hitting his head.".....

What Camp says, and what other people who claim to have been there say in comments posted to news stories, is that they were scared.

"I hate to say I was afraid of my own police department, but I was," Camp said.

His description of frightened, distraught patrons just does not seem to square with police accounts of being subjected to a drunken, groin-grabbing gantlet during a routine "bar inspection."

Stonewall's unfinished legacy

From the Guardian newspaper:

Post-Stonewall improvements in the lives of many LGBT people have been profound, though neither swift nor easy. The American Psychiatric Association finally removed homosexuality from its handbook of mental disorders in 1973. The US supreme court finally invalidated all remaining laws that criminalised sexual acts between consenting same-sex adults in 2003. Millions of us have come out of the closet – in our workplace, to our families and in our neighbourhoods, proving that we are, indeed, everywhere. LGBT publications and organisations abound, including 4,000-plus Gay/Straight Alliances in the nation's schools.

Still, the trajectory of LGBT rights has not been one long, unbroken upward arc tending towards justice. A dozen years after Stonewall, the federal government wilfully ignored HIV/Aids for so long, as it thought it affected only men who had sex with men and other "undesirables". No federal law protects LGBT people in the areas of workplace discrimination, housing or hate crimes, while the (significant) handful of states that do have laws often omit transgender people and LGBT youth from their protections. Anti-gay bullying runs rampant in our schools, and a disproportionate percentage of homeless youth is LGBT. Over 16,000 service members have been ousted from the US armed forces under the "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) policy – an average of two per day.

Last November, Proposition 8 in California overturned an earlier court decision granting marriage equality. Though five states now recognise same-sex marriage, the 1996 Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA) deprives legally married same-sex couples of the 1,381 privileges that federally recognised heterosexual couples enjoy, including rights regarding pensions, social security survivor benefits and immigration. It also bars us from filing a joint income tax return and levies a heavy "gay tax" on health insurance and inheritance. Small wonder a recent UCLA report on poverty in the LGBT community found that same-sex partners are more likely to be poor than our heterosexual counterparts.

You've come a long way, baby, but you aren't nearly done walking.

Stonewall: when we had enough

40 years ago, the police raided a shady bar in the Village.

40 years ago, a group of marginalized gays decided they'd had enough of being harassed.

40 years ago, an angry lesbian hit back.

40 years ago, the street kids rebelled.

40 years ago, the drag queens fought.

40 years ago, the raid sparked days of rioting.

40 years ago, the community discovered itself, threw open the doors, and said "Enough!"

40 years ago, it began.

Resources for Stonewall:

1. Wiki page
   
2. Counterlight's informal history: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V
   
3. New police documents at Outhistory.org (Check out their other exhibits).
   

Do we need a leader? Reflections on Stonewall

This is the 40th anniversary of Stonewall. 40 years! For an historical view of this almost accidental event that changed our world, please see this terrific series by my blog-friend Counterlight: Part I, the mystery of Stonewall, followed by Part II, the Riots, and Part III, who rioted at Stonewall? and most relevant to this discussion Part IV, on the post-Stonewall movement.

Counterlight writes,

What both groups did, together and separately, was create a new confrontational gay politics sharply different from the ever-so-polite accommodation and influence peddling of the old New York Mattachine society. It was a participatory politics in which everyone had a part in the decision-making process and everyone participated in political activity. This was no longer the leadership driven politics of the old New York Mattachine. It was political action that was frequently very loud, angry, vulgar, messy and conflict-ridden, but it was also surprisingly effective and quickly got the attention of city politicos who never before took seriously anything gay.

In contrast to other civil rights movements, there was no clear leader or symbol for the gays: no one who could galvanize the movement or symbolize it like a Martin Luther King Jr or a Betty Friedan. The NY Times agrees with Counterlight,

Even in the movement’s earliest days following the violent uprising at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village 40 years ago this week, no singular leader emerged. Some historians believe this is in part because it was — and still is — difficult for the average American to empathize with the struggles of gay people......
By contrast, the moral authority that leaders like Dr. King, Ms. Friedan and Ms. Steinem could claim — and the fact that Americans did not look at them and imagine their sex lives — made it easier to build respectability with the public.

Another reason for the absence of a nationally prominent gay leader is the highly local nature of the movement. Unlike the civil rights and the feminist movements, the gay movement lacked a galvanizing national issue.

Of course, a generation of potential leaders was decimated by the AIDS/HIV crisis in the 1980s. The TImes goes on,

As the AIDS crisis was contained, gay activists shifted their focus in the late 1990s and early 2000s to laws about discrimination, hate crimes and domestic partnerships. Successes on those issues were due in large part to gay rights groups that rose up at the local level and learned to work with local lawmakers....Activists on the state and local levels were already well in place and found themselves positioned to wage the campaigns for same-sex marriage — as the recent successes in the Northeast have shown.

“They see dispersal as a great thing, that it’s better not to have a concentration or too much attention overinvested in one individual,” said David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who has written about the civil rights and women’s rights movements.“The speed and breadth of change has been just breathtaking,” he added. “But it’s happened without a Martin Luther King.”

The downside of this is the upset we've seen in the last week and a half, of course. There is a huge variety of opinion in the community, from the more stately "go slow" of the classic gay right groups like HRC, to the scrappy bloggers demanding action. On a conference call on Monday with the White House, everyone is confused about how to deal with the bloggers. Meanwhile, the WHite House is having a "secret celebration" of Stonewall that they haven't told anyone about.

Whether Mr. Obama will address the complaints at Monday’s reception is unclear. One person who received the invitation said the White House was billing the event as a celebration, akin to the festive affairs the administration holds on St. Patrick’s Day or Cinco de Mayo. Another said the invitation included an offer to bring a guest. “They want people to understand that their partners are welcome,’’ said this person, speaking anonymously because the White House has not announced the event.

The bloggers are stewing at the secrecy and the lack of movement.
To me, this seems to be very similar to the events after Stonewall, when the rabble on the streets, not the professional organizers, finally had enough and said so.

Counterlight notes,

We see in the new leaders that emerged in the weeks and months following the riots a real change, especially in their public image. Gone are the suits and dresses and the anxious politeness.....The suits and the dresses were gone forever, along with the fear and the isolation.

Maybe that's what's happening now, with a new change in our leaderless, evolving movement. We'll see!