Celebrating Pride Month with Our Friends at Raytheon
You're telling me you washed yourself with a rainbow?
I create these little myths about myself in my mind, which is likely why I received a score of 18 out of 24 on a Narcissistic Personality Quiz at the start of quarantine. One of those myths is that I am constantly one of the most memorable and lovable students in a class despite being mainly just okay in school, low-to-medium attractive, and often genuinely annoying.
Whether or not this myth is true, Jen Jurgens fed into it this week by agreeing to be part of today’s newsletter so to answer your question: yes, I will continue on this ego trip for a little while longer.
Jen Jurgens is a PhD candidate in the History department at Emory University studying late 20th-century American history and media (“essentially this means that I'm just finishing my dissertation away from completing my doctorate. So, I spend most of my time writing or thinking about how I should be writing.”)
She was also the TA for one of those classes I did just okay in but took the time out of a number of days to talk with me when I was in the throes of research on my thesis—and again this week to talk with me about Pride as we approach the end of this year’s Pride Month.
Today, we’ll look at why it's important to remember the origins and history of Pride, how to avoid feeding into the phenomena of rainbow-washing, and Antonin Scalia????? (but mainly Jen’s research.)
Jenny From the *Bowden Hall on Emory’s Campus
As even strangers on the streets know, I love talking about my thesis. While my project was so small-scale in comparison to the work academics like Jen are doing, it took up so much space in my life. I also had an incredible network of people (also like Jen)who just let me ramble through my thoughts and help me collect them into something legible.
But enough about me (for this section). I asked Jen:
Emily: In my mind, we're besties because I loved all of our conversations at Emory but in actuality, I can't answer this with complete confidence: I know the questions I'm about to ask you are not really about your PhD research but are about topics you've taught or TA-ed classes for. Can you hype up your work as well as explain why you agreed to talk with me about all of this today?
Jen: I've had an eclectic teaching career at Emory!
I have, weirdly enough, not yet taught classes completely dedicated to my own dissertation research. Instead, I've TA'd courses on American politics and LGBTQ+ history and designed and taught a class on the Politic and Cultural History of HIV/AIDS in America.
My own work does touch on political history and, as a queer woman, I think it's important to teach queer history, particularly in programs where there's been a real absence of that material. I wanted to teach about HIV/AIDS because it's a profound moment in American politics and culture and yet it is rarely taught in high schools and colleges.
I usually describe my work as a study of cities, capitalism, and the carceral state. My dissertation focuses on the political and moral economies of policing and punishment in Houston in the last half of the 20th century. I'm interested in how various political actors–police officers, municipal leaders, residents, business owners, workers, and the media–dreamt of, ordered, and policed the city.
I spend a lot of time thinking about emotion, particularly fear, is reported by and portrayed in the media and then how those portrayals are received by residents.
While it may come as a shock to all of you reading, I wanted to celebrate Pride Month by talking to Jen about the history behind it.
Although members of the LGBTQIA+ community existed well before 1969 (another shock) and the Gay Rights Movement grew out of roots set before any bricks were thrown, Americans who are not biased headasses have been celebrating Pride Month in June since the Stonewall Riots, which began on June 28, 1969. As our favorite historian puts it: “The riots are widely considered a watershed event that transformed the gay liberation movement and the twentieth-century fight for LGBT rights in the United States.”
I asked Jen:
Emily: I feel as though Stonewall and the origins of Pride celebrations have become something of a myth at this point. How does the history of Stonewall compare to the mythicized version of it, and does that affect how Pride is often perceived?
Jen: In some ways, I think the mythologizing of Stonewall isn't all bad— we all need our foundation stories.
But I do worry about how the mythmaking turns Stonewall into something exceptional and distances it from the long history of queer resistance in America. Sometimes this narrative of Stonewall as spontaneous eruption can decouple the events of Stonewall from queer activism and erase earlier uprisings and moments of resistance.
It also can erase just how long queer activism has been centered around resistance to police surveillance, abuse, and violence.
I often think about the Stonewall mythology in the context of a history class I took taught by a teacher who, when I asked why we weren’t talking about intersectionality in our conversations about the Gay Rights Movement and were really only focusing on white gay cisgender men, told me that that was “not within the class’s purview.”
To him, it was more important to focus on who threw this first brick (and to tell us that the story of Marsha P. Johnson throwing it was wrong) than it was to talk about why bricks were being thrown in the first place, or that the riots lasted until July 3rd, or how the event sharpened the relationship between the LGBTQIA+ community and the police significantly.
By this tangent bitch session, I mean to offer support for Jen’s point: glorifying the Stonewall Riots allows people to pick and choose which parts of it they want to celebrate, which often results in the most important lessons being left out of retellings.
But there has to be a way to celebrate Pride while still remembering its origins.
Emily: I know the word originalist immediately summons the ghost of Antonin Scalia, but from a historical perspective, are you a Pride originalist or revisionist? Do you like how Pride is celebrated today or should it pay more homage to its riot roots?
Jen: Summoning the ghost of Antonin Scalia is a true horror story.
This is in some ways an easy question and a hard question for me. The commodification and commercialization of Pride is pretty gross to me. My queerness is specifically rooted in abolitionist, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist politics and I certainly would like to see more politics and activism in Pride. Many of the current incarnations of Pride act as if "the fight" —as loosely conceived as it often is in Pride discourse— is over. Love wins and American Express will give you a rainbow credit card.
But there are still a double-digit number of states where you can be evicted for being LGBTQ+1, Black and brown trans women are disproportionately victims of violence and murder2, Black men and women are diagnosed with HIV at disproportionately high rates, and LGBTQ+ youth are overwhelmingly more likely to experience houselessness than straight youth. The over-the-top focus on celebration and rainbow tourism makes it hard not to question just who Pride is for and who it leaves out.
And yet: I can't deny how many people, particularly newly out folks, have told me how much that first Pride experience has meant to them. We need more spaces for queer joy and community in this world.
I just wish that Pride could more often be a space where radical queer futures are dreamt up and our imaginations about what queer liberation could mean was expanded.
R******* S**s “G** R*****!!”
I just want to say that the working title of this newsletter for two weeks was “Raytheon Says ‘Gay Rights!!’” since I saw Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) calling out the said defense contractor Raytheon for spicing up their Twitter profile with a rainbow logo for June. I did not know this article existed until (check the clock) right now, and feel so unoriginal and also unfunny.
Let me backtrack a little now that I've gone on my second ego trip in one newsletter: companies love to participate in Pride month by selling rainbow versions of their products, “celebrating the LGBTQIA+ community,” or (at the actual bare minimum) changing their logos to feature the rainbow Pride flag.
The trend, known as rainbow-washing, is often intended to hide the fact that a majority of corporations actually donate money to politicians and organizations with anti-LGBTQIA+ agendas. More importantly, like all performative activists, the companies often have reputations for discriminating against their own LGBTQIA+ employees.
While I’m petty and wanted to stir up more drama about these fake fans, Jen had a much more elegant take on the matter:
Emily: Do you have any thoughts on this phenomenon of "rainbow washing"? What are some alternatives to this that companies can do to actually make a difference?
Jen: I walked into a Target to buy dog food two years ago and saw an endcap full of rainbow decorated shampoo bottles. I fully had an out-of-body experience wondering just who on earth this was for.
Ultimately, most if not all companies put a rainbow on their merchandise and/or social media for the same reason they do anything: to sell things.
So, should companies create safe and equitable workplaces and they should stop donating money to politicians who are anti-LGBTQ+ rights? Sure. But companies can't love a community or anyone else. And liberation and safety won't be found through corporations— it will only be found through each other.
Disinvesting our worth and freedoms from consumer citizenship and instead investing our time and energy into mutual aid and communities of care should be our project, not winning over corporations no matter how sympathetic they may seem.
Thinking about how Pride is still often seen as a party despite its riot origins and in spite of the challenges the LGBTQIA+ community has and continues to face (least of all those set forth by, like, Walmart and AT&T), I asked Jen:
Emily: What does Pride Month mean to you?
Jen: Even though I'm not hugely invested in Pride Month personally, I do enjoy the spontaneous celebrations and coming-togethers that arise during the month.
I appreciate that in the discourse and debates around just what Pride is and what it could be, we continue to reflect on queer history and imagine queer futures.
Now, that’s something worth celebrating.
I can’t begin to thank Jen enough for still talking to me all these months and moons after I did well enough in Professor Crespino’s Right-Wing America class, and for answering my questions!!!! Jen adds that “people are always welcome to reach out to me here if they want to talk.”
We here at Emily For President would also like to thank our sponsors at Raytheon for donating to both my campaign and Elise Stefanik’s!!
According to the Human Rights Campaign, at least 29 transgender or gender non-conforming people have been murdered in 2021 alone. The correct number is likely much higher due to a majority of these violent acts going un- or misreported.