June 28, 2025 marks the 56th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, commemorating the day patrons of a New York gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, fought back against a violent and discriminatory police raid before taking to the streets for a five-day revolt.
The Stonewall Inn was known as a haven for the most marginalized in our community - trans and gender nonconforming people, homeless youth, sex workers, and people of color; people who faced overpolicing and incarceration in every aspect of their lives; people to whom the provisional and largely factious sense of safety provided by wealth, white privilege, and passing privilege was not available. It is not a coincidence that the spark of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement was lit by people like Sylvia Rivera, and her friend and collaborator Marsha P. Johnson, who understood that the “American dream” was an empty promise that had nothing to offer them, and that taking action was the only way to make change.
But after the smoke of the riots cleared, after brave and desperate people had taken crucial action that made it impossible for queer rights to be ignored, those very people were too often treated as an inconvenience to a movement whose goal was reframed, not as liberation, but assimilation.
It is our duty not only to remember Sylvia and Marsha, but to remember how we failed them as a community and a movement. Four years after the riots, during the 1973 Christopher Street Day Liberation Rally, Sylvia Rivera fought her way to the stage to express her pain and anger at a “gay liberation” movement that ignored, silenced, and mocked members of our community who weren’t “men and women that belong to a white, middle-class white club” - the imprisoned, the unhoused, the poor, people of color, and trans and gender nonconforming people. She was booed off the stage.
In 2025, we are living in a time of extreme backlash against anyone who isn’t straight, cis, white, and gender conforming; of increasingly violent rhetoric and actions against marginalized people; of living under an administration that wants to force us out of the country, back into the closet, or into the grave. Conservatives try to convince us - or, too often, queer people who do not experience other forms of marginalization convince themselves - that the only thing standing in the way of our acceptance by the mainstream is those people, and if we throw them to the wolves, we’ll be safe. But wolves are always hungry, and if we allow them to eat up our most vulnerable community members, we will be next in line.
This month, we are energized by the nationwide protests against ICE, and the community organizing taking place behind the scenes to protect and materially support the immigrants who are being targeted. We are energized by the lawmakers, activists, and everyday people fighting back against attacks on trans people’s rights to obtain healthcare, to compete in sports, to work without harassment, and to simply exist in public without fear. We are in a time of extreme threat, and more and more people are realizing that action, not assimilation, is the only way to respond to that threat. But the truth is, the threat was always there. The status quo is death by degrees, and the illusion of safety we live under in “normal” times is just that - an illusion.
Now more than ever, it is crucial for us to heed the lessons that mainstream queer leadership of the past too often complacently ignored: we must continuously center and circle those of us in our diverse LGBTQIA+ community who are the most vulnerable, and we must work continuously to dismantle the systems that harm us all. Not just today, not just this month, but as our ongoing praxis.
Queerness is inherently liberatory, and our liberation is tied to the liberation of the factory workers whose fingers bleed as they sew garments with little rainbow flags, and the cashiers whose wages are stolen by being forced to work unpaid overtime. It is tied to Palestinian liberation, prison abolition, disability justice, and racial justice. It’s tied to our siblings in the Congo mining coltan at gunpoint so we can have the newest devices to distract us from the consequences of overproduction and planned obsolescence.
As the people who are born outside of the enforced status quo, who can not and will not live lives prescribed to us by the same institutions that enforce colonization and capitalism world-wide, we know that our queerness is a gift and an opportunity to find alternatives to the acceptable level of constant unhappiness and stress we’ve been trained to inhabit. Capitalism has never truly made anything “for us” - it’s up to us to create the world we want to see.
At New Coyote Consulting, our core team - CEO Marina Martinez-Bateman and COO Kate Tedrow - is non-binary and/or queer, and so are the majority of our contractors, clients, and community members. Pride is every day for us, and it’s not just a feeling - it’s an action.
We prioritize clients who are transgender or gender nonconforming people and Black, Indigenous or other people of color, especially those who have recently come into their power. We work only with organizations that share our values of queer liberation - if not as their primary mission, then as part of their understanding that, as the great Fannie Lou Hamer put it, “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Every day, we work to raise up LGBTQIA+ leaders and help their voices be heard, supporting the labor of organizations that alleviate the harms and counter the toxic narratives of patriarchal white supremacist ideology that seeks to silence and obliterate our diverse community.