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The combination of competence, the necessary skills, intelligence, and most importantly, the willingness to sacrifice oneself to effect change is…rare. It’s also uncertain whether results would be positive.

Consider what is needed to pull off ‘focused’ violence - that is to say, assassination of key targets. You need to be sufficiently skilled to manage at least one successful strike. You cannot communicate with people to do this - it’s far too easy to get caught in the modern day. You need supplies and equipment, and sure, guns are somewhat easy to get in the US, but they aren’t the only thing you need. You need access and information, some of which is public, but some of which can be hard to get, and can draw attention by being sought (keep in mind algorithms are pattern matching to find this stuff).

Then consider the potential outcome of these actions. As mentioned before, organizing is impractical since it would mean getting caught before doing anything with much higher probability. Regardless of your skills, the chance of getting caught approaches 100%. You may be able to take out two or three key senators, or if you’re very good and very lucky, a few supreme court justices, before being caught. At this point you will either be imprisoned, or you commit suicide to avoid this fate.

And what’s the result? Violence of this sort to effect change is hard to pull off, but even harder to predict the outcome of. If you’ve succeeded in all plausible goals, you might manage to change the makeup of the supreme court - that’s probably the best possible outcome you can hope for with this sort of violence, but right now on the gay front, the supreme court shockingly has yet to do anything too bad, so you may not want to provoke that shit. But there are a lot of possible bad outcomes. And as someone smart enough to pull this off, you’re smart enough to see that. It could lead to increasingly strict rules, to retaliation against the group you’re trying to help - it could even be the catalyst to strengthen your opponents position enough to make things worse elsewhere.

The idea of someone killing a bunch of the key bad guys is great, but it has so many impracticalities, and worst of all, such an uncertain and potentially worse outcome that it’s probably just a bad idea overall, even as much as I too sometimes wish someone would just kill some of these motherfuckers already.

Stonewall as a riot isn’t as notable as an outburst as it was a starting point. What would become the LGBTQIA+ of the time were underground. There were frequent police raids of establishments and there was violence all the time but none made the news. It was swept under the rug. Stonewall was noisy and it got a lot of the cis hetro folk actually talking about things that had previously been relegated to innuendo or silence.

In the aftermath of the riots the Queer community noticed and organized. There had been nice quiet liberation marches in the past where people dressed in their Sunday best and tried to look respectable or ride the line so people could be confused about who might actually be breaking some laws in bed. But they devised something noisier than a riot. Taking all the stuff reserved for the clubs and spilling them onto the street. Pride was conceived as an Independence day style celebration with “the Battle of Stonewall” as it’s memorial date. It was conceived at the time as a type of violence, not against people but against the silence. To keep people talking by being unabashed and even they were surprised how many queer people actually existed. The community due to external threat had been anonymized, atomized and carefully concealed so nobody had any clue how many queer people were actually out there. It was always just assumed to be a very few. Prides were hardcore shows of force where people courted arrest and police violence. One could see the continued Pride societies as being a safety measure. They are an organized entity, yes they are largely organizing parades and municipal events… But they are also highly socially connected and technically mobilizable. It’s a measure of keeping in touch and having an internal structure of people who know how to organize.

It’s also important to remember that the community has a continuity problem. There’s not as many queer elders as there should be because AIDS survivorship selected for those who were closeted, lived an exclusive heteronormative life style except for partner or just weren’t out having a good time in public. Those who remained to steer the ship were the quiet and mild mannered who were tangential to the violence. Everyone was slow to move on AIDS because it was thought to be a scourge on the obcene and it mowed down the community in the thousands. The crisis created a stunning loss of experienced liberation fighters at the same time it forged the survivors into a harder core of seige style organization with lesbians at the fore who used primarily beaurcratic means to fight. That beaurcratic framework is what survived and currently endures. It is quieter and fairly peaceable now but technically speaking you need a certain level of hardship and something that makes enough people angry to do violence to cause people to be primed to fight. The LGBTQIA are generally just invested in being happy and living their lives and their strongholds are cities. It’s harder to be queer in a smaller town when people like you are scattered over a distance because those connections are harder to maintain.

We can be better, IMO

No, https://mastodon.social/@whitequark