Twenty years since Stonewall: Gays and lesbians step up fight
1989Brad Judd 1989-06Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 5 →
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New York Tax Day protest demanding "money for AIDS, not war"
This month marks 20 years of lesbian and gay political struggle since the Stonewall riots of June 1969. In the atmosphere of social protests of that time, lesbians and gays took up the fight for civil rights more openly.
New York City authorities provoked more than the patrons of a single bar when they harassed the Stonewall Inn. They touched off days of rioting and demonstrations. Soon, hundreds of new community organizations appeared across the country, and a new national level of activity and awareness developed.
Today the struggle for lesbian and gay rights is regaining the momentum of the years following Stonewall. In the face of mounting anti-gay violence and government assaults on rights, and the health crisis around AIDS, gay and civil rights groups are stepping up their political organizing.
AIDS-activist organizations are exposing the fundamental inability of this society to address the myriad problems aggravated by AIDS. The disease reveals the utter failure of the corporate healthcare and health-insurance system. While vast numbers of people have no care or coverage whatsoever, cutbacks in county hospitals, and other public facilities increase.
The legal assault on women's reproductive rights threatens efforts to limit sexually transmitted diseases. This contributes to the failure of this society to even begin to slow AIDS. In San Francisco, where activists have won somewhat better AIDS-care, shortage of money is cutting into city health services.
SILENCE DEAN AIDS activists have found that to fight AIDS, we have to fight the underlying forces of the system. The profit motive of the drug, insurance, hospital, and health maintenance corporations prevent real progress. Government inactivity and hostility only increases the number of AIDS fatalities.
Insurance companies are moving to suspend coverage of all HIV-positive policy holders and to deny all benefits for their children and relatives. Health-insurance policies generally exclude needed AIDS-related drugs. AIDS Donna Binder/mpact Visuals SILENCE - DEATH activists have successfully reversed these trends.
U.S. government policies compound the crisis, and must be fought every step of the way. The federal government has resisted Medicare funding for proven drugs like aerosolized pentamadine.
Military harassment
military policy continues to dishonorably discharge all personnel suspected of being lesbian or gay. This includes individuals who have lesbian or gay friends (even of the opposite sex!)
The military compounds this injustice by considering all HIV-positive military persons as lesbian or gay, and immediately wastes money investigating and trying to discharge them. Also it denies them any medical benefits.
The overturn of constitutionally guaranteed privacy rights was initially given a boost by the Bowers v. Hardwick case in 1987. Hardwick overturned lesbian/gay privacy rights. The court sent the issue back to the individual states for decision. Hardwick is being used in arguments for the Webster abortion-rights case before the Supreme Court this month.
The strategy of opening up a state-by-state assault on reproductive rights has already been successfully used against lesbian and gay rights. The establishment is allowing forces in unorganized areas, like South Carolina, to pass laws which prohibit anonymous HIV antibody testing and establish quarantine provisions for some people with AIDS.
Although these policies have been defeated in some states, there are moves on the local level to block rational AIDS-care programs. AIDS activists must move nationally to form a more closely coordinated country-wide structure to reach out and better organize these outlying areas.
The AIDS crisis has placed other important civil rights issues off center stage recently. But other problems of gay and lesbian life are being confronted.
Anti-gay violence and hate crimes, police misconduct, domestic-partner rights, and immigration exclusion and deportation laws are subjects of concern.
The urgency of responding to AIDS has galvanized lesbian and gay activists and their supporters to a new level of activity that will spread to civil rights for all. Even with the increase in attacks on the lesbian and gay community, the momentum for changestarted 20 years ago at Stonewallhas not been reversed, but is gaining ground.
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