preaching to the choir

as i just might've mentioned a couple times before on this here blog, i spend quite a bit of time alone. i suppose that's what happens when your best friends either move away or move uptown. i don't really mind it...it gives grandma time to punkrock knit and catch up on her stories (medium on monday, the office on tuesday, and mahtha on wednesday). it also gives her a lot of time to watch netflixed gay movies, particularly gay documentaries. this week i've watched the celluloid closet, a documentary based on vito russo's groundbreaking nonfiction book of the same name. it's about the history of queers on film. anyone who hasn't see it really should see it.

the reason i write this post, though, is because of the documentary i watched last night, after stonewall. apparently it's the second in a series; the first one, made in 1985, was called before stonewall. go figure. the point is, it was a really good overview of the progress gays have made since 1969--i'm netflixing the first one soon. it got me to thinking, though: i don't know many queer people who actually know very much queer history. i've talked to lots of queer people, actually, who have no idea what stonewall is, less idea what the mattachine society was, and seem surprised to find out that fags used to be beaten up by cops and thrown in jail just for being in gay bars.

now i'm not saying that i'm like buddha (wait, is that the all-knowing being i mean? probably not.) when it comes to queer history, but i do think that it's fucking important to know where we came from. i think that if queers had a little more pride in what our forefathers went through they'd take a little more pride in themselves. i think that maybe some of those vapid queens, the ones who live for their diesel jeans and retail jobs and going out on saturday nights, the ones who find activism laughable, the ones who insist on putting tina up their noses, could really benefit from finding out what people were going through just fifteen years ago.

when i was watching this documentary, i just couldn't help but think: did all these people sit through sweaty, secret basement meetings and get arrested and risk their lives and reputations so that my generation would have the right to kill themselves with drugs?

what they were fighting for is our right to express ourselves, get married, be treated equally, and it's a fight we're still in. i'd like to broadcast after stonewall on the washington monument (ours, not dc's) just to remind everyone that.