by Ronan Foley & Milena Germon
Boston, MA / Portland, ME
Pride began as a protest with the Stonewall Riots in June 1969 in New York City.
The Stonewall Riots were far from the first moment of resistance from the LGBTQ+ community against police and state violence—even just a few years before in 1966, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riots were fought over similar issues, but without as lasting of an impact. What really separated Stonewall from previous actions was the movement that was born out of it—one uniting organized and unorganized LGBTQ+ people, socialists, members of the Black Panthers and Young Lords, and other working people in the ongoing battle against police violence.
In 2024, the crackdown on the pro-Palestinian encampment protests show that the fight to defend and extend our rights to protest are central. The same violence from police and the far right is used against the LGBTQ+ liberation movement. This pride month, we should not only look to fight back against anti-queer hate, but also against corporate greed, attacks on immigrants, and the genocidal assault on Gaza.
In 2023 alone, over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ laws were introduced in state legislatures, most of them targeting the rights of transgender people. During President Biden’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign, they promised to enact the “Equality Act” within their first 100 days in office, which would make it illegal to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. Nearing the end of their first term, the bill has barely passed the House of Representatives and lies abandoned in the Senate. States like Tennessee have begun passing dangerous laws that criminalize adults who help children receive gender-affirming care. Despite his public condemnation of these legal attacks, Biden and his cabinet have made no move to expand LGBTQ+ rights—or even protect them.
In 2022, the Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank, produced a document titled “Project 2025,” that outlines a grand plan they hope to see the president implement if the Republicans win the 2024 election.. The authors include fascist and right-wing activists and former Trump advisors like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. The document calls for the elimination of funding for public schools, removal of trans healthcare, and limitation of discrimination protections. At their core, these initiatives aim to rob working-class, oppressed peoples of their rights and access to vital care and services. It’s clearer than ever that neither corporate party has a desire to disrupt this status quo.
Many countries across the globe have yet to decriminalize homosexuality, much less legalize gay marriage. These include Russia, Myanmar, Uganda, and Nigeria, which have strengthened regressive laws against LGBTQ+ people in recent years, adopting laws with harsher prison sentences, and reporting higher rates of police violence. Even supposedly “progressive” Western nations like the United Kingdom are attacking the rights of transgender people. Homophobia and transphobia are unfortunately not new, but they have changed shape depending on the needs of the ruling class.
For example, some pro-Israel propaganda taking shape in the United States right now pushes LGBTQ+ Americans to “consider how anti-queer Palestine is” and imagine “how unwelcome LGBTQ+ people would be there”. Israel, a country where gay marriage still isn’t legal, uses the plight of LGBTQ+ Palestinians under fundamentalist Islam as part of justifying its invasion and genocide in Gaza. The propaganda aims to weaponize identity politics and “progressive” language to convince us that our struggles for queer liberation in the US require us to support imperialist, pro-NATO governments and their wars. This “pinkwashing” or “rainbow washing” pits exploited classes in different countries against one another instead of recognizing their common enemy in the capitalist economic system that depends upon and generates oppression as we know it.
LGBTQ+ Rights Under Capitalism
The fight for the rights of queer people is not fundamentally separate from the struggle for women’s rights and workers’ rights. In fact, the struggles are linked by the economic structures of capitalism. The nuclear family is part of the social structures used to keep capitalism running. The family unit produces the next generation of workers to let capitalism continue to grow. It also takes up childcare, eldercare, healthcare, and other services that would otherwise have to be provided through social benefits. The nuclear family helps the capitalist state minimize or eliminate social spending which results in the capitalist class reaping ever-greater profits while families suffer under the burdensome lack of government social services. The family’s role as an economic relationship under capitalism conflicts with the desires of workers who want to be able to form relationships and create families based on love rather than economic concerns. Reactionary measures by capitalists, including attacks on queer people, seek to prioritize the economic role of the family above all.
LGBTQ+ individuals seem to be increasingly accepted by the capitalist system, but homophobia and transphobia remain useful tools for sections of the capitalist class to divide and rule over the working class. For example, the Red Scare of the 1950s came along with a “Lavender Scare” in which the government accused queer people of being Soviet spies. They relied heavily on neighbors betraying neighbors, which is something we are seeing mirrored today with Texas implementing a whistleblower website to track women seeking abortions, or in Missouri for gender-affirming care facilities.
Discrimination, Exploitation, Repression
Between 2015 and 2022, homelessness among those who are transgender increased by 178%. The percentage of transgender people who are unsheltered homeless has grown by 231% in that time. In addition, 40% of the LGBTQ+ workforce are employed in some of the lowest paying sectors, such as hospitality, education, or retail; which often don’t receive medical benefits or paid leave. Trans women make $0.60 to every $1.00 that an average worker in the US makes.
In terms of workplace discrimination, 46% of LGBTQ+ workers have experienced unfair treatment in the workplace, and 38% report outright harassment, with numbers that increase in cases with people of color.
It is no wonder, seeing the discrimination and oppression that the LGBTQ+ community faces on a daily basis, that 20-30% of the community abuses substances, compared to just 9% of the general population. Exhausted and exploited, we must ask ourselves: what can we do to alleviate these issues?
For Democrats and liberals alike, the solution is to simply denounce homophobia, praise the small handful of minorities who make it to ruling class status, and ensure that community members get represented in the media. But the idea of combating an abstract idea of “hate” is not enough to fight the onslaught of very real attacks from the right, nor will it stop the epidemic of homelessness and discrimination for the working class community as a whole.
While many capitalists today have conceded to some of the demands of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, capitalist crisis sends the ruling class in search of alternative solutions. Increasingly, the ruling class sees repressive, reactionary measures as necessary to stabilize the system, seeking to enforce the traditional nuclear family with an iron fist. Both sides of the corporate political spectrum utilize identity-politics-related strategies to distract the working class from real issues affecting us all.
As discontent among the working class grows, capitalists put the blame on queer people to divert workers from organizing together to fight back on class lines against capitalist economic problems like low wages, inflation, the housing crisis, and the general decline in working-class living standards. Though Democrats position themselves as the solution to these right-wing attacks, they refuse to organize a real opposition, happy to use identity politics issues only to turn out the vote in their favor.
The Fight For LGBTQ+ Liberation
LGBTQ+ liberation requires understanding the connection between the oppression of queer people and all other forms of oppression under capitalism. All workers share a common enemy in the capitalist class that perpetuates the racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and anti-worker oppression that we face. Queer rights are workers’ rights and fighting to end queer oppression benefits all workers. We must come to conclusions as to what will help not only the LGBTQ+ community, but the working class as a whole.
We must demand true marriage equality, one that not only ensures the right to marriage for the queer community, but for the disabled community as well, who unfortunately lose their state/federal benefits once they marry. By ensuring free housing for all, the LGBTQ+ community would no longer experience homelessness or housing discrimination. By ensuring universal healthcare for all, trans people could receive the life saving gender affirming care they need, everyone could receive proper mental health care, and put an official end to the HIV/AIDS crisis that wracked the community for decades. By unionizing every workplace, no one would experience workplace discrimination, lower pay, or suffer from a benefitless job. Social benefits like these are actively opposed or minimized by the capitalist class and their corporate political parties. Only building a workers’ party and a strong socialist movement can begin to win housing for everyone, universal healthcare, and unions in all workplaces.
An injury to one is an injury to all. Fighting back against any form of oppression requires fighting against the root cause: capitalism. This pride month, we need to continue to build the fight for LGBTQ+ liberation as well as the fight for socialism.
Independent Socialist Group 