--- title: Stonewall-Era Activists and Queer Millennials Discuss the State of the LGBTQ Community, Then and Now | TIME description: 50 years after the Stonewall Uprising, TIME organized an inter-generational LGBTQ discussion. canonical: https://time.com/video/u14EUruM/ og:title: Stonewall-Era Activists and Queer Millennials Discuss the State of the LGBTQ Community, Then and Now og:description: 50 years after the Stonewall Uprising, TIME organized an inter-generational LGBTQ discussion. og:url: https://time.com/video/u14EUruM/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/u14EUruM/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Stonewall-Era Activists and Queer Millennials Discuss the State of the LGBTQ Community, Then and Now twitter:description: 50 years after the Stonewall Uprising, TIME organized an inter-generational LGBTQ discussion. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/u14EUruM/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Stonewall-Era Activists and Queer Millennials Discuss the State of the LGBTQ Community, Then and Now > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Stonewall-Era Activists and Queer Millennials Discuss the State of the LGBTQ Community, Then and Now [Watch (HLS stream): Stonewall-Era Activists and Queer Millennials Discuss the State of the LGBTQ Community, Then and Now](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/u14EUruM.m3u8) (11:58)  _Published 2019-06-28. 50 years after the Stonewall Uprising, TIME organized an inter-generational LGBTQ discussion._ --- Jul 28, 2023 4:18 AM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [India's Supreme Court Decriminalizes Homosexuality in a Historic Ruling for the LGBTQ Community](/video/40J8YKN4/) ### India's Supreme Court Decriminalizes Homosexuality in a Historic Ruling for the LGBTQ Community [Tituss Burgess of ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ Sings at Stonewall Vigil](/video/MKks5QjW/) ### Tituss Burgess of ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ Sings at Stonewall Vigil [Remembering Stonewall](/video/9UkBhruj/) ### Remembering Stonewall --- ## Transcript 1969. And just that was when it all changed. That was when we know that it started getting safer for us, that we wake up. Wow. That was our 1770. That was our 1776. Absolutely. Hey, everybody. Hey, thank you. Thank you all for coming today for this discussion. My name is Wilder DAVIES. I'm a reporter here at TIME. And I guess to get started off, what do you think the other generation here should know about about you or your generation of people? I think for myself, when I came into this kind of activism, I was very disdainful of the people who had come before me. I didn't know and I didn't understand their history and their struggles. And what I would like to say to the younger generation is we didn't have all the answers. We didn't do it all right. But we had a history. And you're building on that history. More power to you. But turn around and smile back at us every now and again. And give us give us a high five. We did some things right. And I'm going to hate myself for saying this, but part of why you're here able to do the work you're doing is that we did some things right in building a foundation. Yes, I think that people today don't understand the risks we took and the danger. We were often in we took a lot of risks. Mark was having a drink at the wrong time in the wrong place, and we all took this risk of losing everything in order to be with our friends. I went into that bar that evening, having only been in New York for six weeks. I thought I was the kid. Next door. That's about it. When the police came in and banged people against the wall, mostly trans people, mostly drag queens, mostly anybody who was stereotypical yelling, dike, fag, queer. I was in the back of the bar near the dance floor because that's what any 18 year old wants to do, is dance their ass off. I was scared. I was frightened. I'd never seen people being violently treated and yelled at like that before. Then when the police came a little further into the bar and started to asking people who looked successful or prosperous take out their wallet and take their money and put it in their pocket. In my head it was like, How could you treat us alone? How low do you think we are? Are we just garbage? The police, you know, taking money, stealing? What are we going to do? Call the police? They are the police. And slowly, when they slowly but surely, when they let us out of the bar and they were finally trapped in the bar. Something clicked in my head. All of a sudden I felt empowered. That little frightened boy was in that bar. Then all of a sudden felt empowered. I felt like screaming, I'm gay, you know? No more. Am I going to hide into this closet? So far, our younger crew here, are there are there any things that you want to share or communicate to your predecessors? I really my firm belief is that your generation needs to know that you have a space with us and that you all are necessary. Your existence allows us to be here, but also your existence allows us to inform our existence currently. So we need you all in those spaces. We yes, we need you all in nightclubs, protest rallies, everywhere because your existence is a restaurant. That's 2000. You know, you can show up for the happy hour or the happy hour or the happy hour. Everyone in there will see that they have something to learn. There is someone before them and life continues joyously as a queer person. We continue. On. It's really hard for the queer community or LGBT community, whatever term used to kind of refer to itself in the terminology has changed so much in the past 50 years, like. The past half hour in. The past. I get that question a lot, like on when people ask like, Well, are you using the word dike? Isn't that like offensive? And I'm like, Well, it's offensive when it's the wrong person calling me that. You know, if like a straight man comes up to me and calls me dark and I'm like, Well, buddy, we're going to stop right there. But if someone but as someone in the queer community calls me attack on like how. Yeah, like, but it's like I always like to like when when it comes to, like, reclaiming a word, I always like to think, having been called that as a child, because I was just a little different. I wore my brother's clothes. I was in a majority majorly. All boys like soccer team, you know, Everyone's like, Oh, what a what a dike. And I'm like, Don't do that. But now I'm like, in a shared space with people who are like me. And I'm like, You know what? This is an identifier. This is who I am. This is what I want to I want to reclaim this word. I want to turn it into something positive and I want to make it positive for other people, too. I want people to feel comfortable, like using that word as an identifier and not as something to, like bring up bad memories. I personally love the word queer because I feel like it's not exclusionary and I was having a conversation with someone the other day, a girl who just came out as a lesbian, but she's always been at the bars and hanging out and she just now came out and told her, like, you have always been queer. Your sexuality, you had nothing to do with you being queer, being part of our community. You were a straight girl. Now you're lesbian. Doesn't matter. You were always queer to us. And I think that's a very important part of it, is I like, you know, it also includes our allies. Queer is extremely uncomfortable for me, but I embrace you to identify anywhere you wish. One of the first things we did was say we were going to self-identify. We were going to decide who we were rather than let society decide, of course. But you said something which was, Oh, he was straight queer. Now she's a lesbian. Queer. To me, that means the queer is a political term and anybody can be queer. And therefore it doesn't define lesbian or gay. And we fought for many years to be able to use that label. That's important to us. That ends invisibility. If everybody's using queer, we're not getting anywhere. Especially with remembering Stonewall. We can't ignore the fact that, you know, our three people from the older generation here today are also white. And, you know, I kind of wanted to you guys to speak to that and cause I remember, you know, so there are reasons for that. Let me say that there were a lot of people of color in the Gay Liberation Front, but we live in a patriarchal society that is really unfair and uneven. And the trans women in particular didn't get mainstream jobs, They didn't get health care, and their lives were very difficult. And many of the people of color are dead. We need to do something about this on a larger scale because we can see this today. You know, the police can apologize as one day to the people in Stonewall and a week later a trans woman dies in a cell because she doesn't have $500 bail. So is are they going to apologize to her family 50 years later? As long as we have that kind of system, this will just go on and on and on. What's the work that needs to be done today and in the future? When you're talking about fighting for rights, you can't talk about just yourself. You have to expand what that means. You can't say that you are part of the community and exclude the trans community. If you if you're if you're saying that I'm like, are you really part of our community or are you part of yourself? You know, I think you have to like, you know, stop being selfish for just a second and. Listen, if you can look at yourself today and say you haven't done something that has helped a whole group of people, which is as easy as donating $5. There's so many different ways because at the end of the day, even showing up at the rally isn't going to get. I'm a black trans person that's not going to get me home safely at the end of the night. I'm not going to be getting home safely because of thoughts and prayers I'd like. And on top of it, at the end of the day, walking around in this place is queer spaces, all these different environments, and still finding that like queer people will match gender, me and straight people, cis people mixed into me. And so with that game, every single person has something to learn. Same thing for me. I walk around as an able bodied person who doesn't have to think about how I'm going to be getting from one location to the other. So it's people need to just realize that there is so much more that we can be doing so much more. I worry about people on the on the margins. Homeless youth and homeless elders. And particularly I'm in contact with a number of people who are in our struggle, who dedicated their whole lives to a revolution that never came and they have no resources to take care of themselves now. And we also have to remember that homosexuality is still illegal in 70 countries around the world. And we used to say is still true, that none of us is free until all of us are free. Pride has become such a you know, it's a spectacle and it's been very mainstreamed. And, you know, there you know, every corporate logo is now a rainbow. And until until July 1st. Do you all have any thoughts on like, you know, people who are guests in that space and or just about the the commercial nation of pride? I've always wanted to march in the Macy's Day Parade. You know, kind of here's here's my opportunity. I'm like, maybe I could be a big balloon. You know, the corp, the corporatization, it's amazing. My spouse and I don't live in New York anymore, but we've been here for a month. And except for a big stretch of Madison Avenue, uptown, you can't go any place without seeing rainbow. This rainbow that. And I guess the question we keep asking each other is what's behind it? What happens on July 1st when our seniors can't get housing and kids are being thrown out of their homes and women are being both trans women and sons are being murdered in the street. Have that rainbow mean something? 365 days out of the year. If anybody has any other questions or comments for, you know, each other. Thank you guys for giving me such an education and reminding me where I come from and how I got to be in a place where I am capable of just being me and being happy and also remembering the work that I have to do in my religious community, but in so many, so many communities that maybe I don't have on the top of my mind and I really should. And fighting to want to stay in all the communities. Yeah, absolutely. That's intersectionality. Yes. 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