2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall-Riots, which were the response to massive policeviolence against LSBTI*Q. There was resistance to a violence that was the expression of a hegemonial, heteronormative system, which pathologised, criminalised and hurtfully stigmatised every lifestyle apart form the heterosexual and cis-gendered norm as the deviant-other. These fights are what the annual Christopher Street Day or Pride Parades are remembering.
Still today – 50 years later – violence and repression by the police against queers exists. It especially affects Queers of Color and queer refugees (for whom it is especially hard to get recognized by the racist departments in Germany), gender-non-conforming people, trans* and intersex people, as well as others whose form of life do not conform to societal norms.
Just as it was then, the violence is still directed against left-wing places and houses that – like the Stonewall Inn – are safe-spaces for queers.
Restrictive notions of naturalness restrict our dreams and possibilities of existence. Due to embodiments, they exclude people from the realm of humanity, reject forms of the livable, racialise and pathologise them. They teach people to despise themselves – their own sexuality, their own identity.
Even 50 years after Stonewall, the fight for the right to exist is still an everyday struggle for many queers. Unfortunately this does not seem to play a big role on the big Berlin CSD. Between the Bundeswehr, Axel Springer Verlag and Bayer AG it seems hardly possible to place political content here any more. Marching are those institutions and corporations that contribute to making life more insecure for queers. These are structures and institutions that are pillars of a neoliberal-capitalist, hetero-cis-normative and racist systems that primarily integrates queer subjects into its own privilege structures when they are as white as possible, cis and bourgeois
adapted, and are suitable for constructing a homophobic, racist-marked individual as deviant others of a supposedly liberal and enlightened, western-modern society.
With our demo we want to create a place that hopefully means more security for many queers than the big CSD can provide. We want to take the fight for a society where queers can be proud of themselves – and not in spite of or against a heteronormative system. For us this means a reappropriation of Pride and its renewed political charge in opposition to a largely depoliticized, commercial party parade.
Let’s get critical – Pride is political!
Some of us still fight for their basic rights to exist!
Link to facebook-event here
