REPOST (not originally by me):
Chicago Police attempt to reinact Stonewall by rioting against queers. On Saturday night, May 30th, a group of approximately 100 queers disembarked the red line train at the Belmont stop into Chicago’s Boystown area. Intending to march around a bit, the crowd found themselves too large to fit on the sidewalk (especially in an area where bars are frequent and patrons and tables spill out the front doors). Most of the crowd moved into the street, walking around cars and allowing cars to pass in the middle.
A few blocks down, the crowd took a left turn, and the police showed up from behind. In attempting to get their cars around the crowd, they repeatedly ran into people’s legs, in some cases knocking the victim onto the hood of the car, then slamming on their brakes to cause the person to fall to the ground.
During this time a few queers at the back of the crowd moved one newspaper box and one trash can (without spilling the trash) into the road in front of cop cars. A few other queers, yelling things like “no!” and “this is nonviolent!” moved the items back to the sidewalk (see sibling article, “What Happened at BashBack?” for more details on this incident).
As a few cop cars got to the front of the crowd. The first car in the line stopped and the cop jumped out and ran at the crowd, which parted down a residential side street. The cop stopped, shook his baton at the crowd, then went back to his car. The first few cars followed the crowd onto the side street. More cops parked and began running into the crowd, grabbing queers seemingly at random (although they did catch a high percentage of non-gender-conforming folks) and proceeding to beat them with batons and extendable asps. At this time, there was a scream from the middle of the crowd, and then people shouting, “he just ran her foot over!” The patient was helped out of the fray and a medic took over her evacuation.
During this time, at least 8 cops were involved in the beating of at least 10 queers in the crowd. They drug queers into the street and proceeded to hit them with batons, the queers falling to the ground in attempts to protect their heads. Reports tell of at least five successful unarrests as queers watched each other’s backs. One queer, after very nearly escaping a very determined cop, was cornered against a building. The cop, waving his baton in the queer’s face, kept repeating, “It’s over, do you understand? It’s over. Take your mask off.” The queer, obviously feeling like it was not over, took advantage of a lapse of attention from the cop and took off again, successfully escaping into the crowd.
It appears that the most-targeted individuals were those who conform less to binary systems of gender. This was evidenced in the continued targeting of one of the eventual arrestees, when a cisgendered person put herself between the cop and his target and, instead of being hit, was told, “Move it!”
A summary of the injuries suffered by people in the crowd (not just the arrestees)- a broken big toe, bruised ribs (three people, one of which developed into pneumonia), bruised kidney, sprained fingers with accompanying infection, separated ligaments in the shoulder, soft tissue damage to the elbow, and uncountable bruises, cuts and scrapes.
In the end, four people were arrested, and spent the remainder of the night being harassed and tormented in the jail. At the holding facility, still in Boystown, the queers were mocked for their choices of hairstyle, questioned without being Mirandized, and threatened with rape (“you won’t like it when we leave you in a cell with Tyrone. He’ll sure like you though.”)
Each of the arrestees, now called the Fabulous Four, is facing a misdemeanor charge of Aggravated Assault of a Police Officer with Hands/Minimal Damage. Three of them are also facing combinations of Obstructing Justice, Evading a Police Officer, Refusal to Obey an Officer, and Resisting Arrest. All of their charges can be summed up in layperson’s terms as, “Refusing to Allow Self to be Arrested for No Reason.” For that, we must stand behind the Fabulous Four and support them throughout their court process. It could have been any one of us that was there that night, but certain people, even in a crowd of queers, were targeted based on their appearance, and we need to unite behind them.
The first appearance (arraignment) of the Fabulous Four will be on August 7th in Chicago. More information to come about how to best support them will come in the future- at this point we are not sure who will need travel fees, or if the charges will just be dropped altogether, opening the way for a quick civil case. In the meantime, take this month of the anniversary of Stonewall to think about what liberation of queers means, and at what cost to our community it comes, and look for things you can do, either as a queer or as an ally, to support us in our quest.
PLEASE REPOST WIDELY
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“During this time a few queers at the back of the crowd moved one newspaper box and one trash can (without spilling the trash) into the road in front of cop cars. A few other queers, yelling things like “no!” and “this is nonviolent!” moved the items back to the sidewalk”
WTF??? So trying to stop violence by building barriers in a way that doesn’t hurt any human beings (or even damage anything, unless the cops decided to drive into it) is “violent”?
I really fucking hate it when this sort of thing happens on demos – the only result of the actions of such holier-than-thou ultra-pacifists (whose definitions of “violence” seem to me to be utterly nonsensical) is dividing the movement (whichever movement it happens to be), making it look like demonstrations are incoherent and inconsistent, and making it easier for the “authorities” to use (genuinely) violent means to break up the demo. You’re *doing the State’s job for it*, you sanctimonious idiots.
There’s some more reports back from people that I’m going to post links to, but, yeah, moving aside barriers only enabled the cops to better be able to attack people and totally disrespected the support for a diversity of tactics that is part of the Bash Back! Points of Unity. And, yeah, we’re not even talking about destruction of property here (which I’d say is nonviolent, but our society values property over the lives of most things), we’re talking about moving stuff around that the police say you can’t move, to render the police less effective at hurting people that you’re supposed to be in solidarity with.
Pacifists in general irritate me, because there’s always either a) a break in the logic with something to do with self-defense that doesn’t get logically extended, b) really nasty stuff about how people don’t have the right to defend themselves, or c) breaking up other people’s self-defense (that often doesn’t harm another living thing) in a way that directly leads to someone else being violent.
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Most people were masked up and dressed in typical crusty punk fashion during this police attack. I happened to be there so I can say, the gender non-conformists didn’t seem to be more of a target than the people of color that were there, especially in that part of town . Especially since you really couldn’t read gender that well in the clothes people were wearing including head and face coverings. I saw people of color, maybe about 4 or 5 in the march, that refused to make a ridiculous turn down a dark street with the Chicago PD waiting for them. It looks like some people know when to pick their battles and some do not, or at least do not prepare for them well. For some of us this is real life and not some game we play whenever there is a convention. I mean for real, where were the medics?
I’m glad to hear that people were unarrested. From what I saw when the police picked someone out to attack, the rest of the queers ran in the opposite direction. I felt extremely unsafe and that nobody had my back. After the ruckus calmed down, I spent the next 20 minutes speaking to (mostly) white gay males coming out of bars to see what the commotion was. This was the perfect opportunity for outreach, and community building with the people BB says have conformed and destroyed the ‘movement’. They appeared to be actually concerned, and with the credentials & contacts to give major support. I wonder how many people actually stayed and talked to the people in the streets. I saw many of them headed in the opposite direction of boystown. I guess they got their adreneline rush, the fix they sought out in police confrontation in the streets, and once they got it they were gone.
The next day, walking down halston in boystown with a group of variously gendered queers, I saw plenty of black and brown queers walking down the street looking FABULOUS in their dresses or happy walking arm in arm with their lovers and nothing happened. No police intervention. All I could remember thinking was that stonewall was started by brown and black drag queens so that they could have this type of dignified existence in the streets. Would these same black and brown queers be found “marching around a little bit” in the streets on the previous night in a group of 100 or more? Masked up or not that would have been a death sentence. My point is that 99% of the people that participated in the march had a white skin privilege that sometimes means that they take some of their black, brown, & yellow comrades security needs for granted. Think about it…First they are on the sidewalk, than they are in the street, next thing you know their getting beat up in a dark alley. Who was leading this and do you think it made people feel safe enough to join next time? People were arrested for being stupid and being radical had a little to do with it too of course but, not for being queer. End of story but it still sucks!