Opinion - Pride and protests: A weekend full of division

While many Angelenos celebrated the 55th annual L.A. Pride and mainstream news outlets like ABC7 and FOX11 news covered the celebrations, the reality for many other Angelenos involved tear gas, rubber bullets and breaking news coverage from community-led outlets like CALÓ News.

If we were to take a step back into the history of Pride, we would be angered by the amount of violence and pain that led to the protests on the dawn of June 28, 1969. The Stonewall uprising took place as a result of police raids at the now-infamous Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in New York City. The night that has gone down in history as a canon event for queer and trans life began when police raided the Stonewall Inn and arrested multiple people. The arrests and the police brutality involved, led to an uprising that lasted a total of six days.

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were credited as being the first people in that historical moment to start the movement we now know and celebrate as Pride. They were Black and brown, people who transformed our notions of fear and action, modeling the mantra that we must act in order to not live in fear. The people at the Stonewall Inn on that night in June all those years ago, and all of the queer and trans people now, have something deeply unsettling in common.

We both live in a constant state of fear and anxiety.

We live in such a major state of fear that anxiety, depression and other mental health issues —  including substance abuse disorders — tend to be particularly prevalent in the LGBTQ community. According to Mass Gen, the U.S. is facing a mental health crisis, with nearly 40% of the LGBTQ population in the U.S. reported experiencing mental illness last year, a figure of around 5.8 million people. 

Pride began as the very type of protest that went on this past weekend over the U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, where people have been taken into custody, reporters shot with rubber bullets and tear-gassed, and where union president David Huerta was taken into custody and charged with alleged federal conspiracy charges.

Over the weekend, I celebrated Pride. I admittedly celebrated being queer, while my other communities experienced fear in the face of arrests, tear gas to the eyes and baton blows to the head. It was an internal battle I was not prepared for and a real battle on the streets I was not ready to experience. It made me feel weak and more than anything, I felt tired. I felt scared and I felt like I was not prepared for what was to come from these arrests and this violence. 

I am a proud child of immigrants. My mother is Colombian and migrated here in the early 80s, settling down in West L.A and building a life with children, houses and her religious community.

My father migrated here in the mid-to-late 80’s from Mexico, where he and his family were hardworking farmers. He has worked at his job, without rest, for over 35 years. He rose up the ranks from line worker to general manager. He does not miss work. He follows every rule and he is never late. Both are documented, but only because of luck and the ease of getting papers back when there weren’t so many bureaucratic steps to gaining citizenship or a green card legally.

My parents and their extended family are proof of a now-distant American Dream, one in which we gain status, we become homeowners and business owners, have children and send them off to college to learn things that our parents can’t even imagine.

Though they did the best they could, my parents had other challenges and barriers to their success. So I worked hard in order to succeed for them. I did it for all of the people in my communities. I did it to raise the statistics on Latinx people, LGBTQ people and former foster youth who go on to college despite the odds and get higher education degrees. 

My road to where I am now was paved with uncertainty, food insecurity, homelessness and many other factors that pushed and pulled me back. The analogy I can think of to accurately compare myself to is a catapult. I was pulled down with weights that were added on more and more, until one day I catapulted forward into the life I now have the privilege to live. Though I still struggle in many ways, it is the first time in my life that I am not in survival mode. It’s the first time in my life that I get to exist as a queer person who can enjoy life, build a friend group and establish deep connections with people. It’s also the first time I get to enjoy Pride as someone who is single and who has spent the past 18 months healing from my from my last relationship.

It was the first time in my life, as a lesbian who’s been out for over a decade, that I truly planned to enjoy Pride with my groups of friends.

While I was there this weekend, my internal battle began and I felt torn between celebrating my life and my queerness and covering the ICE raid protests happening not too far from Sunset Blvd.

What I didn’t expect was to see so many other people at Pride, completely oblivious and completely disconnected from the history of Pride, instead glorifying corporate brands and companies that have remained silent over LGBTQ issues, while others have gone as far as rolling back their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives.

If Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera were there at that moment, they would have convinced us to merge our Pride celebration with the protests. They would have rallied us all to join forces, and in the spirit of Pride, we would have marched for our immigrant community members, fighting for their right to due process.

I’m not sure if I made the right decision or not, but the next 60 days will say a lot about every single one of us. We will have to learn when to act, how to react and when to find pockets of joy to celebrate in, because those moments are also acts of resistance.

The Trump administration vowed to strip away rights and has made it their mission to incite violence, fear and anxiety among all working class, BIPOC and LGBTQ people, so it is important, now more than ever, to unite and show up for each other, whether you’re at a Pride celebration or a protest.

The next 60 days will raise our anxiety and fear, but we must remember to also take breaks, celebrate wins, relish in community, hug your loved ones and use whatever amount of privilege that you have, to show up for the communities that are hurting the most in these moments. 

Juneteenth is also coming up soon and I hope to see more of us rally around our Black brothers, sisters and siblings, to not only fight for our rights, but to continue celebrating ourselves and each other.

In the words of Marsha P. Johnson: “There is no pride for some of us, without liberation for all of us.”