A thread from @Blackbox666, one of our trustees looking at how according to its own words, @stonewalluk has changed its purpose, its priorities and its support for lesbians
I’ve been re-reading Stonewall 25 – The making of the Lesbian and Gay community in Britain, published in 1994 to celebrate 25 years of @stonewalluk At that time it was an organisation that I supported, and I felt supported me as a fairly newly out lesbian.
This thread quotes from that book, what Stonewall itself used to say about lesbians, same sex attraction and no matter how much they try to rewrite it, their own history. The most obvious to notice is that of in ‘94 it was an organisation proudly and specifically for LGB people.
To start with Page 5, “Lesbian and gay political activists have never been able to mobilise a constituency. First, we have had to create it. The need to create a shared sense of identity, a shared understanding of injustice, is common to all emancipation movements”
Page 8, “it took the new understanding of sexual politics which had been generated by the Woman’s movement which had reached out onto the streets to demonstrate that the Emperor had no clothes” that sounds familiar, especially in our fight to keep sex based rights!
Pg 54 @PamStClement01 chapter “Stonewall for me is about men and women working equally together. Its part of the vision of what life could be like.” If only there was still equality for Lesbians with Stonewall – just look at the funding! Who gets what?
Page 57 “I was 26 and passionately believed that the world really needed a lesbian-orientated glossy monthly. I know better now” 😊 Chef Heather Savage was ahead of her time!
Page 95 from Angela Mason “Our agenda is based on the premise of the oppression of the homosexual that similarly affects Lesbians and gay men and there is, therefore a unity of interest in opposing that.” Again, purposefully, and unashamedly for Lesbians and gay men
Page 163 From Simon Watney – the following quote is about the HIV/AIDs epidemic but the intention could be relevant today when thinking about sex based rights..
“A gay politics which fails to recognise the urgency and priority of this need has forfeited its claim to the allegiance of the constituency it reports to represent.”
Page 260 From Ruth Everard“ If queer politics offers us a sexual free-for-all, it also offers the potential to lose the ground that women have fought for and won over the last fifteen years”
Just a few snippets of nostalgia from a time when rainbows and Stonewall were positive symbols to me as Lesbian, and an attempt to record accurately the history of the organisation named in honour of the riots started by Stormé DeLarverie
@threadreaderapp please unroll
@threadreaderapp please unroll
