New York Daily News photograph by Joseph Ambrosini of Stonewall uprising taken on Sunday, June 29, 1969 via OutHistory.org

Recently dozens of LGBT pride parades were planned in cities around the world to mark the annual pride week. For many people with commitments to LGBT liberation, this time is set aside in reflection on the struggle for the rights of LGBT people, their history and contributions, and on the need to reveal and oppose the separation and oppression of people with non-normative gender identities or sexual orientations. This year this spreading and increasingly accepted annual celebration has received extra attention in that it marks forty years since the “Stonewall Riots,” the unofficial ‘beginning’ of the contemporary LGBT rights movement in Euro-American world.

The fortieth anniversary celebrations have brought rare attention to an event that has historically been underrepresented and systematically forgotten in our society. In the week beforehand, the New York Times ran editorials and articles discussing the significance of the riots, while various LGBT activists were interviewed on the subject in the corporate media. President Obama himself commemorated the riots with an East Room reception. While many if not most other instances of insurrection, popular resistance, and grassroots activism go unmentioned except by radical intellectuals and historians, the pivotal Stonewall riots seem to have achieved a measure of attention that other uprisings have not, perhaps a testament to the rising acceptability of the LGBT issue as one of fundamental human rights and equal protection under the law.

I wholeheartedly celebrate the all too recent induction of this important event into the public consciousness. It’s not every day that an uprising that was not only spontaneous but also comprised physical force is honorably mentioned, much less honorably mentioned. However, I also believe that it is our responsibility to commemorate the memory of Stonewall not only through highlighting injustices that are uniquely (or exclusively) committed against people for their sexual orientation or gender identity but to draw connections between supposedly separate ‘issues,’ especially connections that cross the border between the acceptably and unacceptably rebellious.  We have the responsibility to examine historical continuities and similarities that extend to the present day and could prefigure unique ways to build solidarity, rather than section off ‘LGBT history’ from other histories of oppression and resistance.

For example, I was fascinated by a first-hand account published in the New York Times entitled “The Real Mob at Stonewall.” The article was written by a US army officer named Lucian Truscott who was one of the only reporters on hand to write on the riots. He mentions, for example, that the raid on Stonewall was not technically against gay people for being gay. Rather, the stated reason was based on the seemingly uncontroversial and much more palatable basis of ‘law enforcement.’ According to the police, the Stonewall (and many bars like it) had been raided for “…selling liquor without a license, which it was….”Truscott explains the process:

“It worked like this: citing disorderly behavior laws, the State Liquor Authority ruled that bars catering to openly homosexual patrons were not entitled to liquor licenses. Gay bars were thus made effectively illegal, which left them to the mob, which happily ran clubs without liquor licenses and paid the police to look the other way. Several more years would pass before the first clubs with openly gay owners would be licensed…and the mob lost its stranglehold, an early legacy of Stonewall.”

In this way, the systematic separation and oppression, the state-sanctioned culling of gay life from the face of cities across the United States, was both carried out through and obscured by the enforcement of liquor laws. Who knows, maybe many police officers themselves thought that that’s the only thing that they were doing as well, just keeping people safe from illegal alcohol rather than criminalizing LGBT community spaces. You’d need to dig just a little bit deeper to discover that gay people could not own bars and get liquor licenses in the first place, but unfortunately for most people that bit of depth accomplished its task.

This situation was immediately familiar to me as someone at least peripherally aware of the ‘law’ practiced in Palestine/Israel in general and the occupied territories in particular. After all, anyone familiar with house demolition practices under the occupation knows that demolitions are always explained as the simple application of laws applied equally to people regardless of their national identity. Palestinians simply build too many houses illegally, and that is why, we are told, there are tens of thousands of houses slated for demolition. But dig just a bit deeper, and you find that while Jewish West Bank settlers’ “natural growth” is staunchly defended by the Israeli government, you find that Palestinians are systematically denied construction permits on both sides of the green line, that no new housing or school infrastructure for Palestinians has been built in places like Jerusalem in forty two years, and that private Palestinian land is being confiscated for Jewish housing expansion. Akiva Eldar, an Israeli journalist and an expert on the settlements, published a straightforward piece on this phenomenon entitled “What about the Arabs’ natural growth?”

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1092430.html

I have also found these publications helpful from Ir Amim (“City of Nations” in Hebrew), an information-producing Israeli NGO working for equality in Jerusalem.

http://www.ir-amim.org.il/eng/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/PlanningCrisisEng.pdf

http://www.ir-amim.org.il/Eng/?CategoryID=254

In this way, in both Stonewall era New York and present day Palestine/Israel, the essential injustice of each situation lies beneath a legalistic sheen, a stinking carcass sprayed with cheap perfume. This oppression, obstructed to outsiders by appeals to ‘the rule of law,’ is also something that both the patrons of Stonewall and the Palestinians of Israel/Palestine have learned and known about every day of their lives in one way or another. It seems to me that as spontaneous as the Stonewall rebellion was at the time, it was also based on deeply and widely shared experiences of oppression, a knowledge that every patron of the Stonewall possessed. And in a sense the Stonewall riots were not only a reaction to long-standing oppression of gay people in New York, but it also denied the police and the public at large the veneer of legality that justified the criminalization of gay life. After Stonewall, the police could still raid gay bars, but not with the notion that they were doing anything other than arresting people for who they were.

The connections between LGBT rights and Palestinian rights are not just comparative. They have been made flesh through activism and solidarity practiced by many activists. “Aswaat” (Voices) is an organization of Palestinian lesbian women who organize against the ‘circles of oppression’ they live as Palestinian and LGBT women. Al Qaws (the Rainbow) is the first Palestinian LGBT organization for all groups in the Palestinian population, based in Jerusalem but with related affinity groups in cities in the on both side of the green line. And of course, Ezra Nawi is a shining individual example of connecting his experiences as a working class gay man, a Mizrahi Jew, and an anti-occupation activist. His activism, like so many others’, was made famous by his recent arrest for “assaulting a policeman.” Writing on the situation in the Nation, Nawi writes of how the occupation apparatus uses his gay identity to undermine his work:

“Over the past eight years, I have seen with my own two eyes hundreds of abuses…and exposed them to the public–therefore I am considered a provocateur. I can only say that I am proud to be a provoker.

Because I am a provoker, the police together with their allies have threatened me, beaten me and arrested me on numerous occasions. And when I continued to “provoke” them, they did not hesitate to out me as a gay man; indeed, they spread rumors among the Palestinians with whom I work that I have AIDS.”

Nawi connects his own experiences of dehumanization to the dehumanization of the Palestinians he works with. Even though he is Jewish, the law enforcement and court systems and their participants see him as an Arab:

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the evil I confront every day in the West Bank could not have been carried out without the Israeli court system. Judge Eilata Ziskind not only mistakenly found me guilty but she instructed the court to invite a translator for the sentencing, as if I do not speak Hebrew; in her mind I, a Mizrahi Jew, am a Palestinian Arab–and Arabs are, almost by definition, guilty.

One the one hand, the oppression scantily clothed in the letter of the law, and on the other the utter dehumanization that Palestinians and to a lesser extent their allies face regularly, are both echoes of past and present experiences of the gay community in the United States. In my view, the lesson from Stonewall is to tear apart the tissue paper rules and legalistic justifications that paper over dehumanization and oppression, to require the apparatus to do its work in the light of day, and to resist in a manner that shatters the images that oppression engenders of the oppressed. When the gays were being arrested, they “…struck vampy poses, smiling and waving to the crowd. This was not the way gays were supposed to behave when they were arrested, and the officers started shoving them with their nightsticks.” What started the riots, then, was the fact that people not acting the way they were supposed to.