Our current democratic crisis demands an authentic, inclusive, radical response.
Ask any of my first-year law students—I am a sucker for democracy. Preventing tyranny through democratic ideals and structures feels borderline magical. The humanizing and civilizing restraints of a functioning democracy demand respect for diversity in ideology, identity and experience. Protecting dissent is a core democratic value and has served as a bedrock for navigating periods of social fracturing and crisis. These are the “better angels” that presidents Lincoln, Johnson and Biden called for and promised. These angels make social progress—including LGBTQ equality—not only a possibility but an imperative.
However, as we close out another Pride month I can’t blame my queer and trans siblings who don’t share my civic enthusiasm. Democracy’s better angels seem to be on hiatus. Relentlessly anti-LGBTQ state legislatures across the country have criminalized trans health care and drag, banned books and sanctioned lawmakers who dissented. The Montana House Majority Leader explained that trans Democratic state lawmaker Zooey Zephyr had to be silenced because “freedom” within the state legislature demanded “obedience.” Texas politicians forced trans kids to begin de-transitioning against the advice of their doctors and the wishes of their parents. The strategic incorporation of transgender hate as a cornerstone of the national Republican agenda has been as transparent as it has been effective, and it’s not slowing down.
The hundreds of recent state-level laws pushed by far-right conservative leaders betray a transparently anti-democratic national agenda. Each of these laws—whether they are targeting abortion or gender-affirming healthcare or library books—further cement an ideologically centered brand of political control that silences dissent and consolidates power through fear. Fear-based campaigns demand state-mandated intellectual and gender conformity. This is a classic fascistic tool. As these ongoing attacks show, queer, and especially transgender people, are uniquely and disparately impacted by this democratic degradation.
However, we are also uniquely prepared to fight it.
Faced with state-mandated conformity, erasure and vigilante violence, Pride has become a radical democratic exercise. It is a celebration of our difference and the stubborn joy we have carved out of it. This is the essence of queer democratic defense and it has been the source of our individual and collective liberation for decades.
The post-Stonewall Gay Liberation Front and earlier organizing actions at the Black Cat and Compton’s Cafeteria were founded in a tradition of survival. Alongside other pro-democracy groups, the early LGBTQ civil rights movement recognized the role of social transformation as a mechanism for democratic preservation. Through riots, marches and the development of technocratic expertise, the LGBTQ rights movement has succeeded in many ways. Many states now prohibit discrimination in public spaces, in housing and in education. Federal employment discrimination protections have been extended to include LGBTQ people. And the landmark Supreme Court decisions Lawrence v. Texas and U.S. v. Windsor celebrate their 20th and 10th anniversaries this month.
But these victories are inherently limited. The LGBTQ rights movement has transformed how society perceives us, but we have not done enough to transform society. We secured rights by arguing for our sameness, abandoning our difference. Pride became the ultimate product tie-in with mass market validation filling shelves with rainbow shrink-wrapped queer accoutrement. But this year cannot be business as usual.
Recent movement towards the meaningful incorporation of racial justice and trans rights within the broader LGBTQ rights movement has helped shift Pride back to its liberating roots. While the fair-weather allyship of corporations undoubtedly stung some, it shouldn’t unmoor us. Our current democratic crisis demands an authentic, inclusive, radical response. No amount of rainbow-wrapped commodified queerness can do this work.
Pride can be the radical embodiment of queer democratic defense if we let it. Modern queer democratic defense empowers the LGBTQ people who are at the epicenter of the crisis to work outward to demand holistic, comprehensive solutions to inequality.
Organizations like the Sylvia Rivera Law Project embody this approach. Honoring transgender and civil rights pioneer Sylvia Rivera, SRLP centralizes the need to respond to systemic racism and poverty within an infrastructure that encourages self-advocacy, direct services and broader movement building. Such intentional, non-transactional intersectionality can serve as a model for responding to the issues of inequality and unanswered human suffering that strain the fabric of democracy.
We have seen the underbelly and know that democracy is not a naturally occurring, self-renewing state. It is an imperfect and fragile invention, but one worth defending. Expanding access to opportunity, education and political involvement is essential to preventing the widespread acceptance of the easy answers of fascism.
We have so much to lose, but so much to give.
I believe in America’s better angels, but I also know that patience and “obedience” won’t summon them. Pride is here, shrink-wrapped or not. Mark it with stubborn joy and be a model of radically inclusive, empathetic democratic preservation. Let yourself be guided by those who have done the work before us. Speaking against apartheid in 1978 Black bisexual poet and activist June Jordan read her now-famous poem Passion. She concluded: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
Read more:
