Who Are the Police Protecting and Serving at Pride?
As much as Pride may be a sigh of relief, it is also a reminder of how fragile that room to breathe together can be. Sometimes it is Pride organizers themselves who have tacitly approved when armed agents of the state, in their mind, preserve that space from disruption from other queer people. In 2017, police in Columbus, Ohio, arrested a group who would go on to be called the Black Pride 4, who had interrupted the parade to protest police killings and the exclusion of Black and brown trans and queer people from Pride. The protesters had locked arms and asked for seven minutes of silence in recognition of Philando Castile, days after the officer who killed him was acquitted. The crowd laughed and cheered and said ignorant things, said Wriply Bennet, a Black trans activist and artist who was arrested. That same year, police made arrests when activists in New York also interrupted the Pride parade. One banner they marched with read, There Are No Queer Friendly Cops. The crowd outside Stonewall reportedly cheered the police on. If you were to return to those same Boston streets in 2019, you may have encountered police who were made quite welcome at another Pride eventa so-called Straight Pride, backed by far-right groups. The Straight Pride people were vastly outnumbered by counterprotesters and by police, who arrested 34 of the counterprotesters, unleashing pepper spray, using their cop bikes to ram people back and away from the Pride parade so that cars bearing alt-right microcelebrities might pass unmolested. By then, three years into the Trump administration, those on the far right were openly seeking power by aligning themselves with archaic sex and gender norms still more palatable than white nationalism, though, for them, inseparable from it. They were also turning up all that summer at Drag Queen Story Hour protests organized by MassResistance, now one of the groups pushing an anti-trans youth panic in state legislaturesand which first launched in 1995, when a dad in Newton, Massachusetts, claimed gay adults were out to recruit children, as evidenced by Boston Youth Pride. Today, at a time when Republican legislatures are attacking transgender rights across the country, wrote the Times editorial board, its a strange moment for the L.G.B.T.Q. community to be closing the door on some of its own and missing an opportunity to broaden its coalitionas if the mass introduction of bills governing our gender and sexuality was somehow divorced from the ongoing policing of LGBTQ people. No matter how many mayors and governors support, let alone appear at, Pride events now, they still sit atop a power structure maintained by police. The same police, under the guise of quality of life, routinely surveil and arrest trans and queer people for existing in public in ways they deem disorderly. All this is playing out in a country where basic protections from anti-LGBTQ discrimination in education, housing, and health care are still the subject of debate in Congress, and which has been seized for nearly a decade now by real mass resistance to police violence against Black people, including Black queer and trans people.