Critically, though, also, to elaborate, in addition, in this year and at this time our Pride calls for a new sermon for a new time for a return to community and a new, renewed earth. In this long year since Ferguson and this long week since Charleston, where nine black saints young and old were shot and killed during a bible study, in which three other black churches have been burned by arson in Knoxville, TN, Charlotte, NC, and Macon, GA, our Pride also calls us to return to its desperate roots in Stonewall on a sweltering night in 1969. In the long months since Janelle Crosby and Tyra Woods were assaulted on Atlanta's public transit, when dozens of dozens of trans people were killed last year, when eight trans people were murdered this year in as many weeks, and when these are mostly trans women and mostly trans women of color, our Pride enjoins us to return to our first marches and our first protests and our first calls for action.
At this long moment when the immigration rights advocate and activist Jennicet Eva Gutiérrez was shushed and booed and laughed at on Wednesday when she challenged President Obama about ICE policies during an invitation-only White House Pride reception for LGBT leaders, our roots compel us to remember that that our Pride is also about ICE policies.
Gutiérrez was shushed and booed and laughed at by leaders of the movement that emerged from Stonewall...
As she called for an end to misgendering abuses and deportations of queer and trans immigrant detainees, people represented by those leaders...
She is herself a trans woman of color claiming the place and precedent of Sylvia Rivera, Ivan Valentin, Tiffany, Tammy Novak, Spanola Jerry, and the Puerto Rican scare queens and drag queens and early trans veterans of the very event that gives its name and its month to our Pride, that many attribute as having led directly to those very leaders standing in a room at all, at the White House, in June, for a Pride reception.
The irony is palpable; and it seems so clear to me that, in some ways, we have lost track of who we are and from where we've come. We have forgotten in some ways that we are and our heritage is embedded - trunk, limb, leaf, and root - in Stonewall: in the edges and in the cracks and in the broken and boarded windows of a sleazy dive bar in a questionable neighborhood in an era of bar raids and paddy wagons and newspaper arrest listings.
It is so critical to our Pride that we love and stick up for and celebrate ourselves - and it is essential to our Pride that we love the Other, that we stick up for people like the people who led Stonewall, people we may feel nothing in common with and don't typically think about and maybe don't like and maybe are ashamed of. I don't want to pick on those reception attendees, some of whom may have felt in deep solidarity with Gutiérrez in ways that didn't register on the videos - MCC's own Rev. Elder Nancy Wilson was there, and our brilliant friend Bishop Yvette Flunder - and yet it would be a missed opportunity not to use this powerful illustration of where we don't want to find ourselves: We cannot become complacent, cleaned up and dressed up at the White House with aperitifs and spritzers, so glad to have made the list and to be included, listening to a beloved President whom we probably voted for twice, among the well-groomed, polite - the 1%, so to speak - of the LGBT communities... and afraid to attend to and heed the challenge of the undocumented trans Latina calling for change for some of our most vulnerable. Afraid to risk our new position. Afraid to threaten our new standing. Afraid, maybe, to return to our roots as the young, poor, closeted, cross-dressing, hated, hunted - and fierce and courageous and rebellious and righteous veterans of what was a six-day riot throwing bricks and garbage and dog poo at buildings and windows and police.
That's where we started. Like it or not. And that's where I'm asking us to return.
Because they had nothing to lose, they acted with boldness and desperation. And boldness and desperation are what is called for in this long year and this long week and these long months and this long moment. Jennicet Eva Gutiérrez risked everything she had gained - she was on that invitation list. She was in that room. And she spoke up. And she'll maybe never be invited back. And she is undocumented. And she put herself in the crosshairs of the very system she was criticizing, that detains and misgenders and misassigns trans women to cells with men and deports detainees to countries hostile to queer and trans persons. If nothing else - if you disapprove of her tactics or her strategy or her timing - if nothing else, I hope that you will absorb and respect the jeopardy this woman placed herself in in order to draw attention to the needs of some of our most vulnerable.
But it is not the call of our heritage in Stonewall alone that compels us to be mindful of our edges, because it is also the call of our biblical ancestry: those folks we just highlighted as part of our story, part of God's story, and part of the Church's model for how to live and love in community... (Continued at Part 3)