Be Like Marsha.

By Brea Baker

As Pride month comes to a close (even though pride is 365 days a year!), I think about the urgent connections between its origins and the past month of resistance and liberation in the streets.

In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, police began a dehumanizing and violent raid on a bar called the Stonewall Inn in New York City. The people inside were the most outcast and vulnerable people in the gay community — trans women, gay femmes, butch lesbians, many of them homeless youth. NYPD procedure was to line people up, check the gender identification, and violate their bodily autonomy to “verify their sex”, as a basis for arrest.

That night, a trans woman refused to let police violate her, not this time. Her act of defiant courage and self-love was the first spark in a series of acts of resistance, which turned into nights of protests. Trans, queer and gay people flooded the streets, facing police violence to declare fiercely that they were human beings.

A year later, on June 28, 1970, the first Pride marches took place in several big cities.

Much has changed since then and yet some things have not. While Pride has become official, lavish parades in our cities, there have been breakaway marches organized by Black and Brown queer and trans people from vulnerable communities — people who look at lot more like those who were there at Stonewall that fateful night — still fighting to be seen and respected, to be free of state-sponsored violence.

June 2020 has seen another uprising against police violence, in nearly every city and town across the country. While official Pride parades were cancelled by the pandemic, queer and trans people of color are still out in the streets demanding our liberation. And on June 28, 2020, NYPD tear gassed, beat and arrested people at the Queer Liberation March in New York City, fifty-one years to the day after the Stonewall uprising.

Our society will never become a safe place for Black and Brown people, especially queer and trans people, as long as the police forces as we know them still exist.

That’s why the movement is talking about defunding police — shifting our state and municipal budgets into programs that create safety and wellbeing rather than violence and incarceration. This is going to take sustained local activism. We also want the immediate decertification of officers who violate the power and authority entrusted to them, so that they cannot transfer to other police departments. And, we demand an immediate end to the federal policy of distributing weapons of war to state or local police entities.

As we move away from “Pride month” and towards not-everyone’s-Independence Day, let’s honor the courage and tenacity of those who came before us, by taking action today and every day. Whether it’s marching, making calls to elected leaders, donating money or time, sharing social media posts, having conversations that educate others — and educating yourself — every single action makes a difference.

Brea Baker is a writer, activist, organizer, and member of Justice League NYC.