Some Advice from LGBTQ Elders as Worldpride Kicks off Amid Fears

Yomiuri Shimbun

4 days ago

Matt McClain/The Washington Post
People dance during a WorldPride Welcome Party at Berhta in Northeast Washington on Saturday.
They were born too late to have witnessed Stonewall, lived through darkest days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic or have memories of a time when it was illegal for same-sex couples to marry anywhere in the country.
Still, four 20-somethings from a small private college in south-central Pennsylvania got out of bed before sunrise and spent a few hours on a bus to D.C. so they could make it to the U.S. Supreme Court for a gathering that would take them back in time.
They would listen as longtime LGBTQ advocates, who had come together to celebrate the 100th anniversary of gay pioneer Frank E. Kameny's birth, spoke about struggle and the progress it has wrought. They would hold candles and look on as those advocates marched in loops in the high court's shadow holding large signs – black lettering on white poster board that recalled the very first gay rights demonstration in the nation's capital 60 years ago. The posters declared such things as 'Gay is good' and 'Homosexuals ask for the right to the pursuit of happiness.'
Tatiana Gonzales, 22, watched in awe, an electric candle in each hand, a 'trans lives matter' shirt peeking out from beneath their black hoodie. Gonzales would later describe the experience as transformative, how the candles in their own hands felt more like a passed torch – a reminder that their generation must pick up the work started long before to ensure that progress is not undone.
'Wow,' Gonzales recalled thinking, 'these are really the people that helped make this happen. These are really the people who fought for us to have these rights.'
As D.C. decks itself in rainbows and welcomes WorldPride, one of the largest international observances of Pride Month, many LGBTQ people say that they are finding inspiration not by imagining a brighter future – but instead by revisiting a more hostile past.
After years of buoyant celebrations of advancements and greater acceptance for members of the LGBTQ community over the last two decades, for many, Pride is taking place this year in the shadow of mounting legal and cultural attacks: books featuring LGBTQ+ characters have been removed from school libraries and curriculums; hate crimes are on the rise; the federal government has barred transgender people from the military and girls' sports; HIV prevention programs and gender-affirming health care have been slashed; drag shows have been banned at the Kennedy Center; and state legislatures around the country have introduced more than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills.
The young people assembled outside the Supreme Court that day kept coming back to one word: 'Scary.'
They feel fearful of political and social attacks on LGBTQ people, they said, and they worry about the safety of their friends, family and even themselves.
'There's a very real shot that we won't have those rights that we've just kind of had for the majority of our lives,' said Elspeth Hunter, 20. 'It's so scary.'
In the D.C. area, LGBTQ trailblazers who formed secret societies in the '60s, marched in the '70s, read aloud the names of AIDS patients of the '80s and '90s, and staged kiss-ins and mass weddings in the aughts have also been reflecting on the nature of progress: how it is won and how it is protected.
How they hope the next generation is listening – and preparing – to carry it into the future.
Finding 'familia' at Pride
José Gutierrez, 63, knows what it feels like to watch the government turn its back on LGBTQ people.
When he was in his 20s, Gutierrez said, he kept a personal phone book with the names and numbers of all the people he knew. In the worst throes of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, he said, he would open that book nearly every month to cross out the names of those who had died.
The grief felt inescapable, unending.
'I wish that new generations knew what that was like,' he said. 'Those were difficult times because we didn't have any medications, we didn't have services, and people that were infected with HIV/AIDS, some of them, not everybody, but some, would prefer to commit suicide.'
In 1993, Gutierrez was invited to attend the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation as a representative from Atlanta and a member of the Latino community. When he arrived, he said, he could hardly believe what he was witnessing: A million people in the streets. ACT UP protesters carrying coffins through the city to protest the government's inaction in response to the epidemic. A giant memorial quilt unfurled across the National Mall that included panels from every state and 28 countries.
Gutierrez was asked to read aloud the names of Latino people who had died of the disease. Recalling that moment still makes him weep.
Gutierrez moved to Washington soon after, inspired to continue working to support those who were HIV-positive and immigrants and Latinos in the LGBTQ community. He's advocated for better bilingual health care and education about the HIV/AIDS epidemic and worked to create distinct spaces for LGBTQ Latinos in the District. In 2000, he founded the Latino GLBT History Project. Seven years later, he organized the first D.C. Latino Pride.
On Saturday, Gutierrez will ride at the front of the Pride parade as an honoree and co-chair of this year's WorldPride march – an event he said is as much a protest as it is a celebration.
'We're protesting because we need visibility for many reasons. The first is: We have, against our community, the LGBTQ community and especially the transgender community, so much violence and hate,' Gutierrez said. 'We also need to celebrate our lives, our rights, even though we are now having a lot of issues, just to be with thousands and thousands of people around the world in a safe space.'
'Familia, like we call it in Spanish,' he added. At Pride, 'we're in familia.'
The pendulum keeps swinging
Eva Freund isn't coming to the parade. She doesn't like crowds or loud noises and, is still recovering from a fall last year in which she broke her femur.
But at 87, Freund is one of the earliest members of the District's first gay rights group, the Mattachine Society of Washington, and still makes herself – and her beliefs – known everywhere she goes.
In the retirement community where she lives with her wife, Elke Martin, Freund's front door stands out in the long, winding hall. Rainbow flags dot the wall, the door frame and the flower pot from which a long, winding pothos vine crawls. A sticker declares her home a 'hate free zone,' and a rainbow plate says, 'Love always wins.' An ornate marriage contract, framed and signed by Freund and Martin, hangs in the hallway surrounded by photos.
Even the mezuzah at the entryway is painted as a rainbow.
On a recent day, as Freund made her way upstairs, a young man stopped and thanked her for speaking out at a recent event.
'Hey, kudos to you for saying what everyone was thinking,' the man said.
Freund smiled. She had asked a visiting politician what meaningful actions they planned to take to protect marginalized people – she was tired of the talk and the 'do-nothing Democrats,' she said.
'I just appreciate you standing up and saying what you said yesterday; I know that's nothing new to you,' he added. 'But especially in that setting where everybody's there and everybody's kind of like, 'Did she really just say that?' And, like, 'Yeah. She did.' '
When Freund began identifying as a lesbian in the 1960s, being gay was all but illegal in public spaces. Workers suspected of being gay were fired from their jobs in the federal government. LGBTQ people were routinely rounded up and arrested at bars or in parks amid police raids.
Even the American Psychiatric Association at the time classified homosexuality as a mental illness.
In her youth, Freund demonstrated for women's rights and gay liberation. She carried signs with other trailblazers like Paul Kuntzler and Lilli Vincenz, calling for federal reforms and the removal of homosexuality from the APA's list of mental illness diagnoses.
She was defiant in the face of police, who, when Freund was at a D.C. lesbian bar with her friends in the early '60s, raided the joint, asking each patron to hand over their IDs.
'I never saw myself as an activist. I saw myself as a curmudgeon,' Freund said. 'I wouldn't be necessarily someone who wanted to lead marches or organize marches, because I know that change comes incrementally. Unless you have a really bloody revolution, change does not come in a big fell swoop. And people's minds get changed incrementally.'
But, she admits, she has seen a whole lot of change: Friends, who for years hid who they were, able to come out. Her marriage to Martin, her partner of more than 30 years. Legal protection against discrimination – in Virginia, where she lives, it's illegal to deny housing or employment to anyone based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
She doesn't take it for granted. Freund has recently found herself thinking about the period after the Civil War – a period of reconstruction and freedom, for some, but also a devastating backlash that brought with it systemic segregation and discrimination against Black Americans.
'When the pendulum swings,' she said, 'the folks who are in power lose power, and they can't stand it. So when they get back in power they have to chip, chip, chip, chip away' at whatever progress was made.
'The question,' she went on, 'is how much damage can they accomplish in all that chipping?'
Freund does what she can in her own little slice of the world to keep that chipping at bay. That means trying to help young people understand the history that came before them – how to persevere in the face of hatred and discrimination – and being out, proud and visible.
Each night when Freund goes down to the community dining room to eat with her wife, she said, the two of them walk in together, past tables of people, holding hands.
The last survivor of the 1965 march
Kuntzler, the sole surviving participant of the District's first gay rights march in 1965, has remained active in the ways he knows how.
The 82-year-old, who still rides his bike to get around the city, is a regular at anti-Donald Trump demonstrations, having attended the 2017 Women's March on Washington, where he held up a sign that read 'Donald Trump Is the Ugly American' (a nod to the 1958 novel 'The Ugly American'). He later walked in the March for Science and the People's Climate March.
In April, Kuntzler marked Trump's second term by attending the 'Hands Off!' rally on the National Mall with a homemade sign: 'Trumpism is fascism.' Later that month, he joined supporters at a reenactment of the 1965 protest for gay rights in front of the White House.
As he walked in circles outside the tall White House fence, Kuntzler held up a placard much like the one he made more than half a century ago. It read: 'Fifteen Million U.S. Homosexuals Protest Federal Treatment.'
The figure he cited – 15 million – was an estimate based on the statistic that about 10 percent of the population at the time was probably gay.
Decades later, Kuntzler marvels at the passage of time and the progress it has brought.
Gay and lesbian politicians hold office in Congress and state legislatures around the country; the former U.S. secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, is openly gay, married and a dad.
Kuntzler and his partner of more than 40 years, Stephen Brent Miller, became legal domestic partners in a civil ceremony in 2002 – two years before Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage.
'Well, I think probably the national gay community, LGBT, probably have made more progress than any other group in America. I mean, the change has been astonishing,' Kuntzler said. 'We couldn't conceive of the idea back in the '60s that there would be laws to protect us from discrimination, that there would be openly gay elected officials. … The whole idea of marriage equality was something we couldn't conceive of.'
Kuntzler ran Kameny's campaign for Congress in 1971 – a historic first in several ways: Kameny was the first openly gay man to seek congressional office and he did so in the District of Columbia's first election for its nonvoting delegate seat.
Kuntzler had planned to attend Kameny's centennial demonstration, but rainy weather kept him home. Kuntzler was heartened, however, to hear that so many young people had attended. He hopes they'll also come to a public exhibit he's featured in and leads tours of: the Rainbow History Project's display in Freedom Plaza on 'Pickets, Protests, and Parades: The History of Gay Pride in Washington.'
Vincent Slatt, the curator, said he built the exhibit to be more than a look back at history. Slatt said he hopes it serves as inspiration – and instruction.
'At that first picket in 1965, it was 10 people outside the White House. By the 1993 March on Washington, it was a million people. What we have grown here, in Washington, D.C., is a movement,' Slatt said. 'This exhibit is not about old people and what old people do or did. … These were all young people who got off their asses and fought, and sometimes they won and sometimes they lost. But over 60 years, we've won a lot more than we've lost.'