There’s a viral doing the rounds at the moment. Perhaps you’ve seen it. It’s called The Gay Rights Movement and it purports to be a potted history of gay rights from the 1950s – when homosexuality was classed as a mental illness and everything including the moral code was served up in black and white – right through to the present day.
As virals go, it’s pretty good. Creator Ryan James Yezak – a film maker by trade – knows exactly which buttons to push and who we want to see pushing them. Gay men are strapped down for aversion therapy sessions. Suits grip the sides of podiums and say things like, ‘If we catch you with a homosexual, your parents are going to know about it first’ (um, apart from us… and you… and, one would hope, the homosexual). Charlize Theron pops up in an inexplicable yet heartfelt cameo, and Lady Gaga over-compensates for being juxtaposed against Martin Luther King by punching the air and shouting a lot. Make no mistake; this is stirring stuff.
But look again, more closely, and you may notice something missing. That something is the 1980s. Large chunks of the ‘90s too. It’s as if Yezak believes, between the death of Harvey Milk and the birth of the Clinton administration, the gay rights movement ceased to exist altogether. In fact, that was when some of the most important work was being done.
The footage in the video – the politicians announcing their support for gay marriage, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – isn’t something that came about of its own accord. The extraordinary sea change the western world has seen with regards to gay rights over the last ten years would not have happened had it not been for thousands of dedicated campaigners quietly pushing, for decades in some cases, against the tide.
Of course it’s heartening to note high-profile support from the likes of Gaga and Theron, but it sits uneasy with me that celebrities should take priority over the extraordinary men and women who were putting their necks on the line long before gay rights was an A-list issue. Where, for example, are the Stonewall riots, singled out by many as the moment the gay rights movement as we know it was formed? Why no footage of the Gay Liberation Front, or its rambunctious New Yorker offspring Queer Nation? Where, for that matter, is the AIDS epidemic, a period when the LGBT community faced some of its greatest challenges, with calls to shut down gay bars and the US Congress actually considering a bill to quarantine gay men?
Hard as it is to believe, the gay rights movement did not spring, fully formed, from the head of Ellen DeGeneres. The civil liberties we have today were born through years of painful labour, delivered by a rag-tag army of street kids, hippies, dissidents and drag queens who organised meetings, launched newspapers, lobbied politicians, marched, picketed, and frequently got themselves arrested for the right to love who they wanted to love.
It is not hard to understand why Yezak has jumped prematurely to the ‘money shot’. It is money he needs; $50,000 of it, crowd-sourced to finance his planned documentary Second Class Citizens. But by ruthlessly excising the grass roots activism that helped win us the rights we have today, the picture he paints is flawed and incomplete. Even worse, the message it sends out to younger generations of gay men and women is one of complacency; that those in authority can be trusted to keep pushing the envelope for us. In reality, however far we’ve come over the last half century, some of them will always need a little push themselves.
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