(Transcript - link for video at the bottom of page. Original production by Powered by Rainbow. Presented by Professor Pride )
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Many people across North America, Europe, and much of Asia and Latin America are finally accepting homosexuality into society. A majority of Americans support transgender people as well.
Granted, it is the minority we hear the loudest voices from, because hate spreads much faster than love does.
But it's a simple fact that more people support lesbian, gay, and bisexual equal rights compared to those who support transgender rights.
And as a researcher, I find this odd. We've covered on this show before how your gender identity and your sexual orientation are both just as valid. But I've always wondered why society doesn't approve of trans people more than gay people.
In fact, as more rights have been gained in America by gay people, including marriage equality and so on, trans rights have pretty much stayed the same, if not gone in reverse.
And many people in the gay community say that gay rights would be much further ahead right now if only we didn't associate with trans movements, ever.
So, that brings up a great question: How did we first start working together? The answer to that lies in how society forced us together.
For many years, we still lived in a deeply segregated society. Schools and public areas were riddled with these symbols.
While slavery was no longer allowed, segregation, very much still was. You had to use different water fountains, bathrooms, and live completely separately from the white man if your skin was any other colour.
That's exactly why the civil rights movement, for the black community, started in the 1950s.
One really important thing to remember here is how close we were. In a previous episode we talked about the start of Gayborhoods and gaytrification.
Because society didn't approve of us being gay, or transgender, we started networking with other LGBTQ people and created a neighbourhood of people just like us.
This way we could live a little more freely without our neighbours calling the police on us if they saw two men living together and so on. Basically speaking, society forced LGBTQ people to be segregated from the rest of society.
But in many cities around the world, black people were forced to do the same.
And in many of those cities their neighbourhoods were, either neighbouring our Gayborhoods, or surrounding it.
Remember, the neighbourhoods we were forced to live in were the slums, the poorest of the housing in the area.
And because of deep racism and bigoted issues in society, black and LGBTQ people could only afford so much on housing.
And thus, we began living next door to one another. So society, effectively, made us neighbours.
Black and Hispanic people grew, understandably, tired of police arresting them for sitting in the “wrong” chair, or the million other discriminatory things that police did back then.
Police in the 1930s and 40s very much took advantage of this and abused their power horribly for many years, even continuing a portion of that racism in today's so ciety.
So, in the 1950s, African Americans st arted to rise up in what is now called the Civil Rights Movement.
In the 1950s to the 1960s, gay people were being imprisoned for being in same sex relationships.
Trans people were being arrested for wearing the appropriate clothing to match their gender out in public.
And routinely, gay bars were being raided by the police.
This eventually led to the Compton’s Cafeteria Riots and the Stonewall Riots, both of which we have covered on the show before. But gay and trans people didn't do this alone.
The person who is widely credited with throwing the first brick at Stonewall is a woman named Marsha P Johnson. And she is actually a fantastic example of how we all started working together.
She is black, transgender, and gay, the trifecta of things police hated back then. And if you're more interested in Marsha P Johnson, there's a fantastic documentary on Netflix about her life and death.
Sure, white gay men stood up and defended themselves in these protests, but we were far from the first people to stand up. It was black, trans and gay people altogether.
We must never forget that gay people would not have any of the basic human rights we have now in countries like America, like marriage equality, and repealing of sodomy laws, which used to imprison us for even consensual acts between same sex adults.
We wouldn't have any of it unless trans people of colour stood up first.
There were times in our history when our movements were told to separate, probably for fear that we might actually get something done if we worked together.
For example, Martin Luther King Junior, who is one of the most famous and influential civil rights leaders of all time, hired a man named Bayard Rustin to be in charge of his events.
Bayard is a gay man, and so, when the deeply racist and homophobic campaign of John F Kennedy came to Martin Luther King Junior and tried to shut down one of his protest, Kennedy's campaign threatened to tell the media how Martin Luther and Bayard were in a same sex partnership, even though no evidence proved that ever happened.
Doctor King later wrote how horrible he felt having to fire Bayard Rustin because of this perception of him being gay, but the damage was already done.
If you look back at history, you'll notice tonnes of people fighting for all of the same rights together.
Gay people were being imprisoned, so were black people. Trans people were being beaten up by police, so were black people.
And in many headline cases, the people who led the movements were both LGBTQ and black.
Make no mistake, society forced us together. Society redlined our communities together so we would all live together.
They didn't care where LGBTQ people and black people lived. They just didn't want us living near them.
Even after we started fighting back, the rest of society kept creating, or upholding, laws which severely discriminated against all of our communities
So when it came time to protest, generally speaking, we were protesting the same laws the government was creating to keep us all down.
And when we showed up to protest, we kept running into one another, whether or not we belong to each other's communities.
So while society, or certain members of our own community here, might be upset that we associate with one another, remember, it wasn't our communities who grouped us together in the first place. We were forced to be neighbours.
And through the constant discrimination we all faced together, we became friends and allies very quickly.
But most importantly: no, now is not the time to separate our movements.
We started this fight for equal rights together, and we will win this fight together, if only we stick together here.
There are times when one of our communities will get more ahead than others, but together we can gain equal rights for all of us.
Thank you so much for watching. Check back to see more LGBTQ lessons in history, health, science, literature and more every single week.
As always, I'm your host, Professor Pride. Have a gay day, everyone, and bye for now.
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