i get that americans love their cultural imperialism, but it really does piss me off that june is âinternationalâ pride month just because something happened in the united states.
in aotearoa, june isnât our pride, itâs theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that âyou owe your rights to Black trans womenâ is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) MÄori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.
But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa donât even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we donât.
our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.
anyway, happy pride, americans. iâm truly sorry that most of you donât see the negative impact your nationâs culture has on the rest of the world. and to the rest of the world reading this, try searching for your own country and cultureâs queer history, donât accept the american narratives as your own. we deserve our own histories divorced from the cultural hegemony of the USA.
