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But this is not a reality for a class of the LGBT community for whom setting up a wedding registry comes far behind the specter of police violence, poverty, and HIV/AIDS. Today, well-off LGBT people have become homeowners, wedding planners, and the coveted new target demographic of marketers. The scholar Lisa Duggan describes such absorption as homonormativity, "a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions"-such as marriage and its call for monogamy and reproduction-"but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption." Simultaneously, the marriage-equality movement began peeling off rich, middle-class, and gentrified gays and aligning them with the ruling class-a straight white majority who not long before persecuted people of color and queers alike. As African-Americans were being plagued by rising incarceration, a lack of access to healthcare, and unemployment, HIV became an increasingly black disease. This solidarity started to wane in the mid-1990s, when a certain class of white gay men got access to medications that turned HIV from a deadly disease to a controllable one. How can two such quintessentially American civil-rights issues-the marriage-equality and Black Lives Matter movements-occur so near each other, and yet feel so disconnected? No one was immune to the disease's lethal grip-and a radical politics evolved among queer people of many races to fight both the epidemic and the straight majority's judgment.
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When the AIDS crisis hit in the early 1980s, the color of your skin or the number of zeros on your paycheck didn't protect you. The 1969 Stonewall riots brought these wildly multicultural groups out from behind closed doors and into public view as Latina transgender activists and white gay men and drag queens banded together to fight for gay liberation. It was so dangerous for queers to congregate that they were forced to do so in underground bars and secret meeting spaces that brought all races, classes, ages, and genders together. How can two such quintessentially American fights occur so near each other yet feel so disconnected? How were the revelers on the steps of the Supreme Court so far from the implosion of a major American city happening just up the street?Īfter all, the long march for LGBT rights began as a diverse brew of ethnicities. I cannot reconcile the divide between two of the biggest civil-rights movements I've covered-marriage equality and Black Lives Matter. Then something unexpected happened, something amazing: Black youth took control and started dancing. The police and protesters were facing off for a showdown in an intersection outside CVS, and members of the media were there to bear witness. Baltimore had quickly emerged as the new ground zero for the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement, but the threat of ongoing violence was getting all the news.Īs day faded into night, the nation wondered if more fires and mayhem would come. My destination was a CVS drugstore in West Baltimore that had been torched the day before and had already become a symbol of civil unrest and the center of the city's riots. Gray had been allegedly illegally arrested-even State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby later stated so-before he was shackled, thrown in the back of a van without being strapped in, and given a "rough ride" that is believed to have severed his spine.
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The night before, a rebellion had begun in Baltimore in response to the death of twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray while in police custody, on April 12.
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That unseemly co-optation festered in my mind as I drove forty miles up I-95 to a city on fire. The caucasity of the crowd couldn't be ignored.