Decentering Stonewall: One Foundational Myth or many?

This paper will review critically both the literature discussing the ‘founding myth of Stonewall’ as well critical appraisals or challenges to this narrative. The scope of this paper is to show that using the 1969 Stonewall Riots as a ‘founding myth’ for the birth of Pride Events and LGBTQIA+ movements across the world has both a unifying function, but also a homogenising function that contributes to the flattening of sexual and gender diversity, particularly in the Global South but also, in some respect, in the peripheries of the Global North. Whilst holding the 1969 Stonewall Riots as certainly important in the genealogy of contemporary LGBTQIA+ social movements, this paper seeks to decentre Stonewall from its role of unique ‘originator’ of queer self-consciousness focusing in particular on the contribution of Decolonial Epistemologies, drawing from scholars such as Connelli, Mignoloii, Raoiii, and Smithiv (among others), but also Queer Scholars who have written about LGBTQIA+ Social Movements around the worldv, in order to charter a history of Pride Events from the perspective of the ‘peripheries’ rather than the Euro-American ‘centre’. This paper seeks to contribute to understanding how we can engage with multiple, autochthonous, and diverse histories of LGBTQIA+ activism in relation to Pride Events that transcend, partially or fully, the legacy of the myth of the 1969 ‘Stonewall Riots’.