Pride is celebration. Pride is also revolution.
Written by Ruth Dan and Edited by Ruth Miller • ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN OLBRYSH
In the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Derek Chauvin and the Minneapolis Police Department, it is all the more important to remember that Pride is the celebration and commemoration of Black and brown lgbtq+ protest against police violence ignited by the Stonewall riots in 1969.
In June 1969, the most vulnerable members of the lgbtq+ community led a series of clashes with the New York City Police Department, beginning at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. The street kids and the Black and brown gay youth led the front lines. The riots ignited the gay pride movement and ushered in a new era of visibility, freedom, and organizing for the lgbtq+ community. Today, Pride occurs in June to commemorate those historical riots. But Pride also celebrates the decades of lgbtq+ organizing it sparked in the aftermath. One estimate put the number of lgbtq+ groups at the time of the Stonewall Riots at 50–60, but two years later there were at least 2500 lgbtq+ advocacy groups active in the country. Radical organizations like s.t.a.r., founded by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, provided support and housing to lgbtq+ youth and sex workers.
Building on this legacy of the Stonewall Riots, Native American and Indigenous communities have developed the two spirit movement, resonant of diverse Indigenous non-binary gender roles. Two spirit was first adopted at the international gathering of gay and lesbian Natives in 1990 to challenge colonially-created derogatory term berdache. A dynamic and relatively new movement, two spirit encompasses Indigenous systems of gender and sexuality that exist outside and independent from the lgbtq+ system.
Alaska Natives have been a part of these revolutionary traditions since the beginning. Anguksuar, also known by his English name Richard LaFortune, is a Yup’ik activist, author, and community organizer. Anguksuar was adopted from his home village early in his childhood by a Moravian family and was raised largely in the Lower 48. After college, he began a path of environmental and anti-war activism in the 1970s after the Three Mile nuclear disaster. He eventually became the executive director of Honor the Earth, a Native environmental advocacy organization dedicated to a Just Transition. Eventually he settled in Minneapolis, becoming part of the city’s diverse Native community. After attending a meeting hosted by the first Native lgbtq+ organization in the U.S., the Gay American Indians, in San Francisco, Anguksuar returned to Minneapolis and held a meeting of lgbtq+ Natives there. This meeting was the first of many, eventually becoming the International Two Spirit Gathering after the innovations of the 1990 gathering in Winnipeg.
At the time, few lgbtq+ spaces recognized the unique needs of Native lgbtq+ and two spirit people. Describing the need for a space specifically for Native lgbtq+ and two spirit people, Anguksuar said, “We didn’t have a lot of places to meet and socialize except with the mainstream lgbt community, which was in bars, and those aren’t a good place for us.”(1) Unlike many other lgbtq+ oriented events, Anguksuar said the International Two Spirit gathering was “an expression of culture, not sexual identity or gender politics […] It’s a place to heal and a chance to see the community grow.”(2) In 2005 he founded the Two Spirit Press Room (or 2spr) in Minneapolis, “a glbt Indigenous Media and cultural literacy project,” which became one of the few organizations in the U.S. doing lgbtq+ and two spirit education and advocacy.(3)
Because of the groundwork laid by Black, Native, and brown lgbtq+ leaders our lgbtq+ community enjoys the freedoms that we do. Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Richard LaFortune used their time, energy, and power to establish community and organization for generations of Black, Native, and brown lgbtq+ communities to gather, heal, and thrive. Native Movement continues in the legacy of Pride and the Stonewall Riots with our work on two spirit and lgbtq+ issues, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives, gender justice, Indigenous feminisms, and police violence.
Quoted in “Sacred Rights of the International Two Spirit Gathering,” UTNE Reader, 2009
Quoted in Queer Twin Cities, 154
Quoted in Queer Twin Cities.