Who are the real heroes of Pride?

 

This Pride month marks the 57th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. The early pioneers of the LGBTQIA2S+ movement, most notably Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, were trans women of color who had little to no money. Yet some queer “historians” put more emphasis on gay capitalists than on our real leaders.

In an effort to learn more about LGBTQIA2S+ history, I recently checked out from the library “The Book of Awesome Queer Heroes: How the LGBTQ+ Community Changed the World for the Better,” by Eric Rosswood and Kathleen Archambeau. The book is organized by topic (religion, the arts, sciences, etc.).  Each section contains a collection of short biographies of various queer figures who were important in some way to that topic. 

In the business section, there is an article on Tim Cook, who created the iPhone. It reads: “Tim Cook became CEO of Apple in 2011, and three years later, became the first openly gay man to run a Fortune 500 company, after coming out of the closet in a Bloomberg article. Apple became the first one-trillion-dollar publicly traded U.S. company under his leadership.” It goes on, “In his role as CEO of the largest tech company in the world, Tim Cook has proved that LGBTQ+ people can be great business leaders.” 

While the authors may have been well-intentioned in writing this book, they are clearly bourgeois liberals trying to co-opt the Pride movement. We see this in the centering and adoration of capitalists. (The book goes on to praise Beth Ford, CEO of Land O’ Lakes, among others.) 

Let us not forget our history, and let us keep focused and centered on proletarian revolution, which will end the capitalist system of exploitation!