Recognized as Sole Originator of 'Gay Pride'




For decades, my enemies in the "lesbigay" Movement have tried to deny me credit for coining the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. They have just been dealt a severe setback: a British podcast about language issues recognizes my role without reservation. Will Wikipedia finally surrender to the truth, or will cowardly liars hide behind anonymity to continue to deny credit where credit is due?



The podcast is "The Allusionist". The particular episode is #12: "Pride", which was placed on the Internet on June 3d and remains current until two weeks from the 3d, the 17th. Even after that, if you scroll down at the podcast's website, you should be able to listen to #12, which is about 18 minutes long. I speak during about 13 of those minutes. The sound is a little garbled at times because we were conversing on a trans-Atlantic fone call.



Documentary proof of my role can be seen at the Second Anniversary Special Issue of the newsletter of the organization Homosexuals Intransigent!, April-May 1971: a scan of a paragraf from that mimeograffed publication that can be found in gay archives in various universities and standalone gay archives. If I can find time to alter the HTML code on that page to allow a link directly to that graffic, I will do so. But considering how backed-up I am in my various computer tasks, this must wait. If you'd like to see that scanned paragraf online, in context, just use your vertical scrollbar to go about 40% down the page and look for a paragraf of text on a white background in a lavender-bordered box. For your convenience, I show a screen capture of that area below.



Who, you might wonder, are the "enemies" who want to deny me credit for what I obviously did do? "Enemies" is a strong word, but it fits this situation. At different times, I as a gay activist and writer/"propagandist" have had various enemies. Early on, they included Communist-influenced people in organizations with names like "Gay Liberation Front", because I knew well and stated aloud that Communists were not our friends, but sought only to use gay people to promote internal conflict in the United States, to weaken this country as part of the drive to carry out worldwide Communist Revolution. I had no hesitancy to point out that Communist Cuba had an internment camp for gay men on the Isle of Pines, which proved handily that Communists didn't want to liberate gay people.
+
There were other organizations, not Communist-influenced, that took stances and adopted tactics not shared by the group I founded two months before Stonewall, Homosexuals Intransigent!. In NY, Gay Activists Alliance staged demonstrations and sit-ins at, for instance, the offices of publications that issued antihomosexual materials. I did not participate in such things, only in the first several marches each June to commemorate the Stonewall Riots. My worst enemies, however, were always the people who tried to confuse gay men and make them identify with and lend their legitimacy and power to people unlike us, especially lesbians, so-called "bisexuals", and what came to be called the mythical "transgendered" people. You see, I and my organization rejected all suggestions that gay men must identify as women or confused losers and cowards who refused to 'fess up to their homosexual reality. It was obvious to me that gay men needed to demand respect for their MANHOOD, and their right to be men oriented to and concerned primarily with, men. Let lesbians take care of lesbians, not parasitize gay men's organizations and misdirect gay men's numbers and money away from men's concerns to, instead, women's issues, and esp. that most heterosexual of women's issues, murder of the unborn, which would, statistically, mean the murder of more boys than girls, because more boys are conceived. I knew full well that that was not just NOT a gay-men's issue but actually murderously antagonistic to gay boys.
+
Rather than argue the merits of particular issues — for instance, whether "bisexuals" are just, shall we say, 'homos in hiding', and "transgendered" people don't have the courage to be openly gay, so pretend to be women so they can "properly" lust after men — these enemies have worked to prevent me from receiving any recognition by society, for instance, being credited in Wikipedia as coiner of "Gay Pride". I think they keep waiting for me to die so they can rewrite history and erase all evidence that I or my stances ever existed. But the more time that goes by, while I am still alive to speak out on a podcast or in print, the more doomed their cause. I WILL be recognized as coiner of "Gay Pride", whether they like it or not.
+
Uniting Suburban and City Gay-Pride Events. Again this year, anti-Newark activists have held a "North Jersey Pride Festival" in Maplewood, dividing the suburbs from the City. Altho the pretense is that that event is inclusive of all types of people from the entire state of New Jersey, it is plain to me that racial animus is a large part of, if not THE primary motivation, behind this suburban event. Disgraceful. Newarkers, fortunately, have not given up their own Pride events, but will again this year celebrate their own Gay Pride Week next month, including a "Sounds of the City" dance party outside NJPAC on Tuesday, July 16th from 5-6pm. When will the "lesbigay" community end the racial segregation in Essex County "Gay Pride" events?



Unfortunately, the gay movement in this area is as crazy and destructive as all of the groups absurdly thrown together now were in the worst, benited days of the 1950s. "Newark Gay Pride" proclaims on its website "A Celebration of Newark's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Community!" There IS NO SUCH COMMUNITY. These groups rarely get together for any reason, and most of the time have no interest in each other, or, if the truth be told, much use for each other. Gay men are not lesbians, not "bisexual", and most emphatically NOT "transgender"."Queer" is an INSULT that cannot be rehabilitated. It will remain, ALWAYS, the exact equivalent of "the N-word" WITH the R. Gay men outnumber lesbians, but are always relegated to SECOND in the various names of this nonexistent "community". Lesbians who would be indignant at men opening a door (while saying "Ladies first!") or pulling out a chair for them at a table in a restaurant have no hesitancy to sell out their Radical Feminist principles to insist that L always go before G.



It's one thing to form an alliance between groups all of which know that they are separate and distinct. It is quite another to try to force all the groups of an alliance to IDENTIFY as each other, as confuses their own identities. It is SHAMEFUL that so many gay men and lesbian women are still so CRAZY, self-denying, and self-despising after all these years. I put forward the term "Gay Pride" in spring 1970, 45 YEARS ago. What is TAKING so long for these people to sort themselves out?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:21 PM