It’s entered the cultural conversation a lot more recently. Why do you think that’s happening now?
“Because the media wants to talk about it. As long as I’ve been alive, I have been talking about black transgender people and the fight that we have. We’ve largely been ignored.
“I think that people are falsely saying that for the first time the black lives matter movement and the fight against racism is now coinciding with Pride Month. That’s not true, black people have been fighting for their lives since they touched America. Since slaves were brought from Africa. Every Pride Month black people are fighting for their lives. Pride was started by a black transgender woman. It started as a riot against police brutality!”
Robyn Exton from HER also mentioned pride’s riot roots. Brands getting involved in a celebration is a new thing.
“Yeah. It should never have been about celebration in my opinion. Black trans women are still being killed at an astronomical rate, right? When we think about Pride, people have corporatized it. There are companies paying to say that they’re not racist, homophobic, or transphobic.
“But, while people are getting all these endorsements and stuff, black queer people are still being killed. If people in our community are still being killed then we should still be rioting. We should never stop rioting.”
What do you think is next for Pride Month?
“What do I want to see or what do I know is going to happen?”
Both?
“I want to see it return to its riotous roots. If we continue to listen to and believe black trans people, we should all be angry, right? We wouldn’t have a reason to be out here celebrating. When we go back to listen to what Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson and all these black and brown transgender people said, they wanted us to be adamant in our fight against legislators and legislation. We need to keep fighting until we tear down the systems that allow for black people to be killed.
“When we talk about Pride, we’re always talking about how far we’ve come. But how far have we actually come if black trans people are still being killed the way that they are? People are rioting again, because people have failed to listen to those before us who told us that this very moment would come if we did not listen to what they were talking about. But, what I know we will do is go back to celebrating, because people are afraid of riots. We would have to get rid of the police, we would have to get rid of cisheteropatriarchy, we would have to really have serious conversations about gender, sexuality and its relationship, in particular, to patriarchy.”