Analysis Of Sarah Lamble's 'Stonewall Uprising'

Today, especially with the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality, it is easy to believe that the fight for queer rights is something of the past, something that America as a whole moved beyond because we have achieved these rights. For example, the conclusion to Stonewall Uprising creates a sort of historical separation that allows anyone and everyone to believe that the United States and all the people within it have moved past homophobia, transphobia, and queerphobia. However, this is absolutely not a reality for many queer and trans people today, especially poor and/or incarcerated queer and trans people of color. The conclusion to Sarah Lamble’s “Retelling Racialized Violence, Remaking White Innocence” brings to light the issues affecting

The entire Stonewall Uprising documentary, and especially the conclusion, places the fight for gay rights firmly in the past and implies that, with the advent of gay pride in 1970, equality had been achieved and all former oppressions could be forgiven and forgotten. Within the documentary, the vast majority of people interviewed are cisgender, white, gay men, and a retired NYPD police officer who fought on the “wrong side of history” at Stonewall had a prominent role. While this may be partially due to the fact that these people are simply the most likely to be alive so many years after Stonewall, it entirely erases the role that people of color, trans women, drag queens, and gender nonconforming people played in the Stonewall riots. Additionally, there is at least one Black trans woman who participated in the Stonewall riots still alive today, and her presence is not a secret within the LGBTQ community. Miss Major, a Black trans woman currently based on San Francisco, is a very high-profile trans

She concludes that mainstream TDOR practices absolve cis people, white people, middle to upper class people, and men of all responsibility despite their complicity in this violence because they did not actively commit murder. Stonewall Uprising focuses on remembrance practices such as gay pride, which is focused on celebrating the “victory” at Stonewall every year. On the other hand, Lamble discusses current TDOR practices, which often involve sensationalization of individual acts of violence and claiming people as victims of one particular oppression rather than intersections of oppressions. She specifically mentions the murder of F.C. Martinez, which his mother, a Native American, believes was primarily race-motivated but that both TDOR and queer anti-hate crime organizations claim were primarily gender- and sexuality-motivated, respectively. In this way, many victims have their racial and cultural identities erased in an overwhelmingly white-led effort to end anti-trans and anti-queer violence, which white people fail to realize is racialized in and of itself. Lamble then mentions a desire for practices of remembrance that focus on collective societal violence, how to stop that,