ENGLISH 10 AAM

JOSHUA F. MIRANDA

ACTIVITY IV

The LBGTQ Community is a movement that is celebrated around June to commemorate the 1969
Stonewell riots in New York City. It’s celebrated primarily for legal rights such as same-sex marriage.
Many agree to the movement and many don’t. I don’t see it as a problem because it questions whether
or not we are free to be as we like or, are we stuck living with what we are born with? I through and
through support the movement but not how they act on it. Gay people showing up to Gay parade are
nothing new but young adults and sometimes teens showing up just to party and in some occasions,
with large groups is rapidly increasing. Paul Ellis, a manager of Cliff’s Variety Store, is part of the of the
generation of LGBTQ activists who fought for basic rights like getting jobs. When he most recently
attended the San Francisco Pride Parade with his partner. He said “I stopped and said (said to my
partner). Do you see any Gay people here?” And his partner said, “Oh my God, no”, he said. They
realized they had run into a cultural shift at breathtaking speeds. Ellis also said that he doesn’t have a
problem with non-LGBTQ people attending the parade, rather, it should focus mainly for Gay people and
their rights. Ellis also added, “They are attending someone else’s party… It just felt disrespectful.”

For many straight people, being Gay is cool but not condemned to it. It felt like a double-edged sword
with one side, where previous generations of LGBTQ activists fought for the acceptance, for a world
where being Gay is a non-issue. And on the other hand, using the efforts of those who fought for
freedom, dulling the reason and importance of the movement and erasing the history of resistance of
those who fought that achieved that acceptance in the first place. Many who attended Pride Parades in
the past stopped because they saw people who attended it saying it was a ‘cool thing’ and forgetting
about the reason behind the movement to which I have explained. One member of the LGBTQ
Community said that these young people are not concerned about the issues the community is facing
and rather they want freedom without struggle.

I cannot emphasize this enough that there are people who are not even part of the LGTBQ Community
that are attending the marches being a bandwagon thinking it’s cool because their friends are attending
it and not knowing the history and the sole reason the movement is happening and that is freedom to
become who they want and the freedom to choose what they want to become. As a straight person
who genuinely supports the movement, I hope that these kind of people get back to there senses and
realize that what they are doing is different than what the previous generations fought for.