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6 GROUNDCOVER NEWS PRIDE MONTH Remembering our radical roots: an argument against the corporate capture of Pride GUY ORON Real Change Real Change is a street paper located in Seattle, Wash. In the last weekend of June, hundreds of thousands of people will flock to Seattle to celebrate over 50 years of continuous Pride celebrations. This year also marks 57 years since the Stonewall riots, the famed uprising that launched the modern queer rights movement. These weighty milestones draw attention to the rich history of the trans, queer, lesbian and gay people in the United States. They also bring to mind the apparent clash between contemporary festivities and past scenes of hardship, of a time when the right to be yourself had to be asserted against a backdrop of police repression. Indeed, TV representation of queer people is at an all-time high in the decade since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. Corporations and brands now rush to produce rainbow logos and merchandise every June. A survey by the polling firm Gravity Research found that 78% of Fortune 500 executives were still planning on rolling out Pride month-related campaigns this year, despite a recent right-wing backlash. The increase in commercial marketability is also echoed in the realm of political representation: the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute estimates at least 1,288 queer electeds hold office today, and Seattle has had two white queer mayors in the last decade. But both in the United States and across the world, the progression toward liberation has been extremely uneven within the community. Queer youth are still disproportionately likely to experience homelessness: a February 2024 survey published by the Washington Department of Commerce found that more than one in 10 unaccompanied homeless youth identified as LGBTQ+, while one in 25 were trans or gender expansive. Respondents stressed in interviews that these statistics were a significant undercount, and that queer youth of color were more likely than straight, cisgender and/or white youth to be homeless. These disparities are also replicated in terms of economic inequality. In 2022, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reported that, while 68% of straight adults owned homes, only 52% of gay and bisexual men owned homes, while lesbians had a homeownership rate of 51%. Nationally, only 36% of transgender and gender-nonconforming people owned a home. Black and Latina trans women are also more likely to experience both poverty and direct violence than their cisgender and white counterparts. This widening inequality within the queer community creates a sense of unease that undermines the very notion of a shared experience. After all, how can people who come from the same purported group have such drastically different experiences? Meanwhile, recent years have seen a rise in reactionary sentiments, such as conservative boycotts of brands like Bud Light, which lost an estimated $1.4 billion in sales after partnering with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a 2023 advertisement. The Bud Light boycott points to a fundamental weakness in the popular representation of queer people: increasingly, people interpret Pride and what it means to be LGBTQ+ through a prism of brands and marketing. This inclination presents a twofold danger of flattening the queer community into caricatures and of limiting the possibilities of who we can imagine ourselves to be. This is where the act of studying history can be particularly powerful — so much of what we encounter today was faced before by our elders and ancestors in the queer liberation movement. A diversity of political currents When we read queer history, we also learn that there have always been varying political currents within the queer community and clashing opinions about how to best fight for liberation. Some activists stressed the importance of mainstream recognition and acceptance, while others eschewed conformity. Several LGBTQ+ organizations recognized the importance of joint struggle along the lines of race, class and gender, while others maintained an exclusive vision of fighting solely for queer rights. Seattle is no exception to this complex history. In 1966, middle-class, white gay men founded the Dorian Society, the first explicitly “homophile” organization in the city, which advocated for the repeal of discriminatory laws. One of the group’s primary methods was to represent gay men in the media as respectable, good citizens, just like straight people. One year after the Stonewall uprising, the Seattle chapter of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was formed. The national group was established shortly after the riots and had a very different perspective from the Dorian Society on how to achieve freedom. The GLF collaborated with contemporaries like the Black Panther Party and included membership of Black and Latina trans women like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. On a national scale, the emergence of the gay rights struggle coincided with protests against the Vietnam War. As JSTOR Daily writer Matthew Willis documents, these anti-war demonstrations featured some of the first visible contingents of out gay men and helped define the fledgling queer liberation movement. “[A]ntiwar politics brought gay liberation out of the political closet,” Willis wrote. The focus on joint struggle organizing continued well into the 1980s. To commemorate the 15-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, Seattle Pride organizers adopted a 12-point platform calling for, among other things, “an end to homophobia, sexism, racism, classism and ageism,” and the redirection of “US tax dollars away from military buildup and back into the social services.” As AIDS became a full-blown emergency, new groups like ACT UP formed to end the stigma around the disease, launching a grassroots sexual health education campaign, providing mutual aid and holding dramatic direct actions to call attention to the devastation of the epidemic. Faced with state neglect and demonization from the right wing, queer people had to create their own networks of care to survive. Nonprofits established during the crisis, like Seattle’s LGBTQ Center, still serve queer and trans people today, providing free STI screenings, gender-affirming care and peer mentorship. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and Mpox outbreak, these groups sprang into action once again to fill the gaps where governments failed to adequately respond. The devastation of the AIDS epidemic touched everyone in the queer community. In King County alone, 3,276 people — the vast majority of whom were queer men and trans women — died from AIDS-related complications between 1983 and 1996. Ahmoy L., a member of the anti-imperialist organization Sông2Sea and a passionate student of queer history, argues that the AIDS crisis marked a turning point in the queer community. “If you are going to understand anything about queer history here in the United States, you have to look at the AIDS crisis,” Ahmoy said. “The ’60s and ’70s was a time of radical protest and queerness as well. … People really felt like things were getting better for queer trans people … and Black folks as well with the Civil Rights Movement. It was a time of fighting really hard with revolutionary optimism.” In the wake of the crisis, Ahmoy said that the queer liberation movement polarized around two groups. On the left was a progressive camp that wanted to focus on the fight for universal healthcare and other socioeconomic rights, while on the right, a conservative camp coalesced around the struggle for same-sex marriage and assimilation into heteronormative society. In the end, the latter group won out. But even as the mainstream political trajectory of the queer liberation movement bent toward legal equality and integration, many voices called for a different approach. In his 2011 book "Normal Life," Seattle legal scholar Dean Spade wrote that trans people cannot achieve true freedom without addressing poverty, criminalization and the underlying structures of capitalism and prisons that enable them. In the early 2010s, Spade and other Seattleites formed the Seattle chapter of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA), a grassroots collective that protested against Israel’s military occupation of Palestine and its impacts particularly on queer Palestinians. Activists with QuAIA popularized the term “pinkwashing” to refer to the use of pro-LGBTQ+ attitudes to cover up human rights abuses and exploitation. This framework has since been applied to a number of other contexts, including corporations trying to “rainbow-wash” their brand. This history of queer anti-war activism has only intensified since the start of the war on Gaza, with many proclaiming the slogan “no Pride in genocide.” In Seattle, the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising against police brutality resurfaced longstanding unease between the queer community and SPD, with many organizers becoming deeply involved in the Defund SPD movement. Citing the long history of cops participating in the criminalization of queer people, Seattle Pride banned SPD officers from participating in the main Pride parade while in uniform in 2022. These concerns were see SEATTLE page 16  MAY 29, 2026

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