The Stonewall uprising is widely considered as one of the most important moments that fuelled the gay liberation movement and sparked the modern LGBT+ rights movement.
The Stonewall Inn was one of the spaces that served as a safe haven for people of the LBGT+ community, at a time when New York forbade homosexual relations and crossdressing. At around 1:20 am Of June 28th 1969, the police carried out a surprise raid at the Stonewall Inn, located in the heart of New York City.
The police stormed into the bar and began to harass and arrest patrons who were not complying with ID verifications or were in violation of the laws mentioned above. Patrons gathered outside the bar after 13 individuals were arrested and more people from the neighbourhood joined the crowd.
Among the people being arrested, a woman cried out: “Why don’t you do something?” Resisting police repression and refusing to tolerate discrimination, people started throwing pennies, bottles and cobblestones at the police and chanting “Gay Power” and “We shall overcome”. The agitated crowd’s actions lasted for 6 days and gained massive media attention.
Immediately after Stonewall, the first gay rights organisations were formed and together with many activists, such as trans women of colour Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, helped shift public opinion.
On the 28th of June of 1970, the 1- year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, the first gay Pride parade was held in New York. It has continued ever since as an annual reminder of what happened that night at the Stonewall Inn and countries around the globe began organising their own Pride parades.
To this day and within the Republic of Cyprus alone, politicians, high-ranked educators clergymen, and people of influence publicly oppose full equality for LGBTQI+ people. Words of hate and discrimination are frequent from authority figures.
LGBTQI+ citizens don’t enjoy the same freedoms and rights most non-LBGTQI+ individuals do. LGBTQI+ youth is in the dark, without role models to look up to or the appropriate sex and health education they need.
Mainstream culture revolves around cis-heteronormative erasing the narratives, participation and visibility of the LGBTQI+ community. To this day, some LGBTQI+ people choose to live in hiding and fear or believe they are better off dead than being their true selves.
Civil partnership is presented as equal to civil marriage (except adoption rights) but no one mentions regulations regarding existing children Of LGBTQ+ couples, issues with widower’s pension, banks refusing loans to same-sex couples under civil partnership, doctors refusing to prescribe hormone therapies to trans people, the government refusing asylum to LGBTQI+ asylum seekers and sending them back to countries that actively seek their harm and conversion therapies are yet to be criminalised.
We are still waiting for legal gender recognition, adoption rights and access to civil marriage. We are still demanding full equality in all laws, safety, participation, visibility, education, job opportunities and access in the commons, in healthcare and in decision-making spaces. We are born into a society that vilifies what is different and foreign. Inside this transphobic, biphobic, homophobic, interphobic society, we learn to bargain with our sexuality, our visibility, and our self-worth.
We refuse to give any more of our space, our time and our wellbeing to societies that thrive at the cost of our lives. We refuse to stand and watch our dignity being raided by systemic hate and discrimination. We choose to unlearn the bad education. We love unapologetically, publicly, persistently. So let’s raise our voices together as the beautiful people of the Stonewall riots did
