TODAY'S LESSON

"But pride and courage were not born at Stonewall, although even the few history books that attempt to document our long but largely unrecorded struggles place the birthplace of defiance there and then. In doing so, they divide our resistance into two steadfast periods, "pre-Stonewall" and "post-Stonewall," the former judged as repressive, the latter extolled as liberated.

Over-emphasis on that single event distorts our history and renders as lesser other acts of equal--and even greater--courage, when circumstances of the time of occurrence are considered.

Way back in 1958, at Cooper's Donuts on Main Street, a favorite after-hours hangout in Los Angeles' downtown, two cops ostensibly checking I.D., a routine harassment, arbitrarily picked up two hustlers, two queens, and a young man just cruising and led them out. As the cops packed the back of the squad car, one of the men objected, shouting that the car was illegally crowded. While the two cops switched around to force him in, the others scattered out of the car. From the donut shop, everyone poured out. The police faced a barrage of coffee cups, spoons, trash. They fled into their car, called backups, and soon the street was bustling with disobedience. Gay people danced about the cars.

In 1967, two years before the Stonewall riot, in the Black Cat Bar in Los Angeles, at the stroke of New Year, plainclothesmen who had infiltrated the bar throughout the night started humiliating and beating the celebrants there. Subsequently 200 gay men and women gathered in the Silver Lake district to protest the raid before squadrons of armed police, stunned by the sudden resistance.

Those cataclysmic events and others occurring before Stonewall, several notable in San Francisco and other cities, were rendered invisible because, at the time, the very word homosexuality was disallowed in all media; its mention even in films was forbidden. As we celebrate with justified pride the advances we have made, it is not inappropriate to remind how those advances came about.

The history of gay oppression is long; its recorded history sadly brief. It is not difficult to encounter young homosexuals who have no idea about our tradition of endurance, the battles that were fought. Recalled, that turbulent history may inspire our strength to cope with new, constantly emerging struggles." � John Rechy, June 2006

�TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places�and there are so many�where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don�t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.� � Howard Zinn

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linoleum cut by Leopoldo M�ndez, squares from justseeds
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