Pride Goeth Before a Summer

I made reference to the Stonewall riots in this week's cartoon, and since LGBTQ Pride festivals, like just about everything else that is fun, have been cancelled this year, my Sapphoback Saturday post for this week rehashes a fistful of my Stonewall and Pride cartoons.

June, 1999

Actually, I've drawn very few cartoons about the Stonewall riots themselves. This one from their 30th anniversary featured one of the most virulently antigay Senators of the time, Jesse Helms (R-NC). No doubt he was in favor of cutting funding for the National Register of Historic Places even without their having adding the Stonewall Inn to their jurisdiction.

The hand in the framed picture behind the senator refers to an infamous campaign ad of his.

May, 2019

I couldn't let last year's 50th anniversary of the riots go unremarked. The cops were probably not as gentle as this one, but at least nobody died from a knee to the neck over the five days of rioting.

July, 2009

If we've seen tremendous progress in 51 years, much of it has been quite recent. Forty years after Stonewall, a police raid on the Rainbow Lounge in Fort Worth on June 28, 2009, was a brutal throwback to the bad old days:

...six Fort Worth officers and two Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents hauled 20 people from the [Rainbow Lounge] and arrested six of them for public intoxication; one was treated in intensive care with a severe head injury, the result of police tactics that gay rights activists would label brutality. The incident was followed by a blitz of media accounts, thousands of angry e-mails and a gay rights outcry that uncomfortably thrust Fort Worth into a national and even international spotlight.

Police Chief Jeff Halstead was vilified for his handling of the incident. Three officers were suspended. And the Texas LGBTQ community stood up for themselves and marched on city hall.

"A couple of weeks ago I never would have been in the street, let alone talking to a reporter," said Benjamin Guttery, a 24-year-old Army veteran who manages a jewelry store and who was detained in the raid. "This has lit such a fire in me. I have to defend myself." So he is toting a placard through Sundance Square that reads, "I WAS HOG TIED BY THE FWPD." In the oversized O he has drawn a pig's face and colored it a porky pink. It's the color of the day.

Five years later, the Fort Worth Star Telegram reported that much had changed because of the raid and the LGBTQ community's reaction.

Todd Camp, a gay activist, said Fort Worth has grown much friendlier toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in five years. Now, maybe an eyebrow or two are raised when two men are seen embracing in public, but gone are the angry fist pumps.
“It’s mind-boggling to think what we would be without it,” said Camp, one of the founders of QCinema, the annual LGBT film festival in Fort Worth. “We would have a much worse Fort Worth for LGBT people. I don’t think we would have made as much progress as we did had it not been for the Rainbow Lounge. It helped the city on a national scale.”

August, 2015

When a film about Stonewall came out in 2015, the trailers showed that its central character was a white male with conventional Hollywood good looks. Activists pointed out — rather strongly — that the central figures in starting the riot were people of color, lesbians, and drag queens whose role ought not to be whitewashed.

June, 2001

So I have generally tried to depict a varied cross-section of our community in my Pride Month cartoons — in most of my cartoons, in fact. Although one can get complaints if the butt of the cartoon is anything other than a white cis male.

May, 1998, In Step Magazine, Milwaukee, WI

And running through the checklist of inclusiveness can be a challenge.

June, 2006

In recent years, at least until COVID-19 came along to spoil the party, the origins of Pride Month often have gotten obscured by the party atmosphere of festivals and parades. But we've thrived in spite of the AIDS crisis and the hounding of religious puritans who, to paraphrase Mencken, can't stand the idea that anyone anywhere might be having a good time.

June, 2004

When I started going to Pride festivals, I had to trek all the way to Milwaukee or Chicago. Not long after that, however, even small cities started having their own LGBTQ festivals.

June, 2011

These festivals allow folks to bust loose and be themselves ... providing it meets with Dad and Papa's approval. Many LGBTQ couples have children of their own, and there are PFLAG parents of elementary-school-age children as well. It is no more unusual to see families enjoying Pride festivals than any other summer festival. (Yes, "PFLAG parents" is redundant, but how else would you know who I was talking about?)

June, 2008

But there's still no escaping the outside world, so I have often used cartoons set at Pride festivals to comment on other issues of the day, whether it was some presidential policy, gays in the military, or in this case, the price of gasoline. Those high gas prices of the summer of 2008 were about to go into freefall, although it came at the price of the rest of the economy tanking.

Q Toon: To Preserve Disorder

I struggled with this week's cartoon.

Having seen the police torture and execution of George Floyd, I completely understand the frustration and rage of the Black community who have complained loud and long of police officers to whom Black Lives Do Not Matter.

I'm not old enough to remember Stonewall, but I do remember the righteous anger of the LGBT community after a jury acquitted police officer Dan White of the cold-blooded murders of Harvey Milk and Mayor Dan Moscone.

But I just couldn't bring myself to draw a cartoon giving my blessing to mob violence.

Hell, I worry enough about the peaceful protesters shouting and singing and not keeping six feet apart. I've been posting here lately about the danger to public health from taverns and churches opening too soon, MAGAlomaniacs screaming at Michigan police, and Madison Republicans forcing all of Milwaukee to crowd into five polling places on election day in the middle of a pandemic. The whole mess must be giving Dr. Fauci a lot of sleepless nights.

These visitors to the city of Milwaukee shouting "Move! Back!" and advancing at the protesters up the street yesterday afternoon weren't social distancing, either. But at least they were wearing sneeze guards.

But protesting on the safety of one's living room couch isn't likely to lead to any improvement in policing practices vis a vis people of color. Unfortunately, people wanting to take advantage of legitimate protest to loot and vandalize appear to have been ready and waiting for this moment.

The arson and looting in Minneapolis appears to have been instigated not by the people protesting Floyd's murder but by some white dude in a gas mask, black raincoat and umbrella, who calmly walked up to an AutoZone store, broke several windows, and started to walk away. All the while, he ignored protesters who shouted at him to stop. You've probably seen the video of the whole incident.

Someone identifying herself as his ex-girlfriend says the AutoZone vandal is a St. Paul police officer. Someone identifying himself as the St. Paul Chief of Police says he isn't.

It's too bad that nobody unmasked him for the cameras and the real police, like this white guy hammering away at a curb in Washington, D.C. Protesters grabbed and unmasked the man, who was dressed all in black just like the Minneapolis vandal, and carried him to police who happened to be on the other side of the street.

It seems clear that there are some young white males itching to foment violence. Chicago Police arrested a provocateur from Illinois who livestreamed himself vandalizing in Minneapolis, and who invited like-minded droogs to join him.

Thursday night, [28-year-old white male Matthew Lee] Rupert, of Galesburg, Illinois, posted on his public Facebook page an invitation for "goons" to join him in traveling to Minneapolis, where he said he was renting hotel rooms and planned to wreak havoc and "take hella good videos." ...
On Saturday night, Rupert posted to Facebook his plans to return to Chicago and riot there. "(Let me know) who's on board I got cars we got this," he wrote on Facebook, updating later that he would arrive in Chicago in two hours....  Videos show him proclaiming, "Let's start a riot" and "I'm going to start doing some damage," according to the complaint.

Again and again, in city after city, witnesses report that the vandals in Black neighborhoods are often white males, some with out-of-state license plates (or none at all). At the very least, some of them seem to have difficulty finding their way back to the freeway.

Maybe these people are just thrill-seeking morons raised on violent video games, or right-wing Proud Boy white nationalists hoping like Dylan Roof to start a race war.

On the other hand, someone identifying himself as the President of the United States says they're all left-wing antifa terrorists, so whom can you believe?

Q Toon: The Stonewall Boycott

This week's cartoon goes far afield from the centers of media attention, so let's start with the back story.

Next month, director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012)  is coming out with a movie, Stonewall, about the gay uprising that broke out when police raided a gay bar on the night of Judy Garland's death in June, 1969. According to Emmerich, the film is a “compelling, fictionalised drama of those days centering on homeless LGBT youth.” Imdb.com has this synopsis:

The plot revolves around the 1969 Stonewall Riots, the violent clash that kicked off the gay rights movement in New York City. The drama centers on Danny Winters [Jeremy Irvine], who flees to New York, leaving behind his sister [Joey King]. He finds his way to the Stonewall Inn, where he meets Trevor [Jonathan Rhys Meyers] before catching the eye of Ed Murphy [Ron Perlman], manager of the Stonewall. He colludes with corrupt police [Matt Craven] and exploits homeless youth [Caleb Landry Jones -- okay, I'm just guessing on that one].

Publicity image from "Stonewall," the movie. Looks like a musical number.

The problem some LGBT activists have with the movie is that it appears to center on a white, "cisgender" (as opposed to "transgender") male character. Pat Cordova-Goff, described as "a trans activist feminine person of color," launched an on-line petition to boycott the movie, signed by over 23,000 persons as of yesterday:

From the previews alone, queer folks have gathered that the centralized character is a white cis gay man. (WHY?) From the previews alone, queer folks have gathered that not many people of color are even in the film. (WHY?) To make this short, we have also gathered that white folks are being credited in throwing the brick, starting the riots, starting the "gay liberation front" and also capturing the heart of a light-skinned transwomyn. (Of course we all fall in love with the white saviors. WRONG.)

Emmerich and Irvine have responded that the role of non-whites and transgender persyns is given its fair due in the movie. Emmerich posted on Facebook that:

I understand that following the release of our trailer there have been initial concerns about how this character’s involvement is portrayed, but when this film - which is truly a labor of love for me - finally comes to theaters, audiences will see that it deeply honors the real-life activists who were there — including Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Ray Castro — and all the brave people who sparked the civil rights movement which continues to this day. We are all the same in our struggle for acceptance.

Irvine posted on Instagram:

Marsha P Johnson is a major part of the movie, and although first hand accounts of who threw the first brick in the riots vary wildly, it is a fictional black transvestite character played by the very talented @vlad_alexis who pulls out the first brick in the riot scenes. ... In my opinion, the story is driven by the leader of this gang played by @jonnybeauchamp who gives an extraordinary performance as a Puerto Rican transvestite struggling to survive on the streets.

Now, if you see any of these people wresting the microphone from Bernie Sanders, you'll know what they're shouting about.

This Week's Cartoon

On the 40th anniversary of the bar raid at the Stonewall Inn, Fort Worth Police investigated the week-old Rainbow Lounge and reportedly found that patrons were drinking in the establishment. In the course of the police making arrests for disorderly conduct, one patron had to be hospitalized for a serious head injury.

Since then, the chief of Fort Worth Police Department, also pretty new to the job, has been in full damage control and apology mode, so at least that counts for some progress since 1969.