Fifty Years since Stonewall: Beyond the Borders of the United States

What does the year 1969 mean to you? To queer folks in the United States and beyond, 1969 is the year that the Stonewall riots transformed the landscape of LGBTIQ movements worldwide. Although I was not yet born then, the 1969 Stonewall riots changed the conditions and potentiality of my life, fifty years later. Although I now know the story of the Stonewall riots, what comes to my mind when I think about the year 1969 is usually a different revolution. In 1969, on the other side of the world, China was in the midst of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966– 76), which ended with millions of deaths as well as violence and abuse. For many years, this is the story of 1969 for me. This is the story that was passed down through family narratives of torture, public humiliation, deprivation of education, and seizure of property.

As a diasporic Chinese lesbian currently residing in the United States, I find myself situated ambivalently in the queer conversation about the Stonewall riots; I feel that I do not fully belong to the story of Stonewall, but I am not able to be totally separate from it neither.¹ Given the current political climate in the United States—the rise of right-wing nationalism along with sexism, racism, xenophobia, and queerphobia, I cannot help thinking about leftist movements in the United States and my positionality. I have also been thinking about the meaning of Stonewall: What does Stonewall teach us about LGBTIQ movements? And in particular, what does Stonewall mean to me, a diasporic Chinese lesbian currently residing in the United States? For me, the meaning of the Stonewall riots is never separable from the struggles and resistance in China, beyond the borders of the United States. This is the story of Stonewall that we are missing today; this is the legacy we need to be reminded of.

To truly honor the legacy of Stonewall, we must not overlook what has been excluded, silenced, and fallen by the wayside. In a transnational frame, homonationalism² or homocolonialism³ is an issue that has been criticized by queer scholars. As a new vehicle of racialization, homonationalism/homocolonialism manifests itself through "the deployment of LGBTIQ rights and visibility to stigmatize non-Western cultures."⁴ As a result, different forms of queerness are placed in the racial hierarchy, measuring against the U.S.-centric model of gayness that Stonewall symbolizes. This is especially true in the annual LGBTIQ pride parades, which have been criticized as becoming "entertaining parades or commodified festivals."⁵ As Armstrong and Crage note, Stonewall is often seen as the birth of modern gay liberation movement in the United States and is "commemorated in gay pride parades around the globe."⁶ To commemorate the Stonewall riots, the first gay pride parade was held in New York and soon spread to other Western cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, and Stockholm.⁷

With commemorative rituals, especially the annual gay pride parades all over the world, Stonewall has become a myth in global LGBTIQ movement,⁸ a "symbol of resistance" and a "myth of emancipation from opposition."⁹ Through the asymmetric, transnational queer flows in contemporary LGBTIQ movements, the myth of Stonewall has become a powerful story and a reference point that LGBTIQ organizations all over the world use to frame the meaning of their work. For instance, one of the most prominent and well-funded LGBTIQ organizations in the United Kingdom is Stonewall.¹⁰ The name of the organization shows a clear embracement of the Stonewall myth; in Poland, the Stonewall Fund was established on the fortieth anniversary of the riots,¹¹ which demonstrates the transnational effect of the Stonewall myth.

However, with the mythical status of Stonewall¹² and global expansion of gay pride marches in transnational LGBTIQ movements, we also see the exclusion and marginalizing of other modes of queer resistance. Although Stonewall offers a powerful story—beginning of modern gay liberation—and sparks the imaginary of queer resistance, it also risks erasing the rich, lived experience of non-U.S. queer subjects...