Police Groups Banned From NYC Pride For Next Four Years, and I Have Some Random Thoughts.

May 16, 2021
HANK ORSO

So apparently Heritage of Pride, the body that organizes NYC Pride, has followed the likes of organizers in Toronto, Indy and others, banning groups of police from participating in any fashion in NYC Pride, as was recently reported on Out.com. This seems to include as security detail, saying they must stay at least a block away from the festivities and respond only when absolutely necessary. Private security and volunteers will handle security and, as I read it, low-level emergency situations. Individual officers may still march in uniform, just not in a group.

Okay, Hank has thoughts. And yeah, those thoughts sometimes shift and change depending on whom I speak to and the more info I garner.

Tensions rise outside the Stonewall Inn

Pride rallies and marches began in 1970 most directly as a response to the 1969 Stonewall Riots which was a community action response to continual harassment and abuse by NY police against the LGBT community. As they say, "The first parade was a riot!" But Stonewall was the most news-worthy tipping point; riots, protests, and political actions had been occurring in cities across the country since at least the late fifties. One notable, multi-day riot was the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria riot in which gay and trans customers fought back against police harassment at a popular eatery in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. This event was depicted in a fashion in 2019's Tales of the City revamp.

When the town I live in started excluding police groups in Pride a couple years ago, I was pretty incensed about it. I had a couple close friends on the local police force who were proud, out gay men, who marched as gay policemen. Proud of their sexuality, and proud of their service to their community. (It should be noted that one is Black and one was White. This issue is closely linked to race.) My immediate thought wasn't that it was a matter of fairness. It was a matter all allies and alliance. In my city, many cops, gay and straight, feel an ally-ship with the LGBTQA+ community. They feel, as I do, that you do whatever you can to strengthen and forge those bonds between seemingly disparate communities, despite members of your community holding that progression back. Only then do you see that those communities aren't so disparate after all.

I felt some activists in my community were loudly pushing away a necessary ally.

Then I talked to some community activities. Ones who didn't look like me. Ones who weren't White, weren't cis, weren't male. Weren't "old."

They opened my eyes a bit to how the presence of large groups of police is truly traumatizing to members of their communities of color, communities of women and trans persons, communities with economic hardship, communities of the "other." This was all before George Floyd, but after Feguson, and after so so many, too many, stories of police brutality and murder. There was simply no way they could watch groups of police, their abusers as they saw them, participate in a celebration of their lives and loves. The cognitive dissonance would be too great.

This made sense. I'd been sitting in my privilege blissfully unaware of the emotional carnage such reporting can do on a community's psyche. Of course I new a lot of what had been happening, but I was removed from it. As a cis White older guy, I walk through this world with a safety net. I have zero experience of what it is to live without that safety net. Even as an out gay man, out since my teen years, I still never felt actually threatened.

Protesting post-Compton Cafeteria

So I've had to change my mind, but reluctantly, and with reserve. I still feel there must be a way for this ally-ship to continue and grow. I can't understand how pushing them away helps my community in the long run, taking a look at the long game. BUT, I also understand that while I used to be the kid, the young man, screaming for equality in the streets of Chicago decades ago, my voice is not the one that needs to be speaking right now. My voice was heard then. I'm only now realizing that that was because there were so many voices not being heard. And now is their time.

I remember with great joy watching groups of police march in the Chicago pride parade decades ago. It was revolutionary. It was dangerous for them. It was normalizing in some way; seeing them being a part of us made "us" feel more "normal."

But that was a different time. And it's time for different voices to take charge. And they may not run things as I would. And that'll be okay, I figure.