Call

Too often our hell still has a name: it’s called normality. Because this normality is the normality of others. In it we are partly still strangers, for some even perverts. It makes our own desires and dreams, our most secret desires, turn against us: because they let us deviate, make us somehow strange. In this heterosexist society, only few concepts of gender and sexuality are linked to recognition; ours can turn into engines of self-loathing in the cis-hetero-privileged corset of norms. Disgust and desire, dreams and shame. We invent our own concepts and categories in order to confront the existence-negating gap of binary language systems, fight our way out of the no-man’sland of the ones without terms and still suffocate far too often from our speechlessness. For many young queers, the world in this way still seems too tightly tied.
2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall-Riots, which were the response to massive policeviolence against LSBTI*Q. For many Queers they mark a turning point in the history of recognition: in togetherness in the night of the 28th of June, 1969, there was resistance to a violence that was the expression of a hegemonial, heteronormative system, which pathologised, criminalised and hurtfully stigmatised every lifestyle apart form the heterosexual and cis-gendered norm as the deviant-other. For many LSBTI*Q the Stonewall-Riots therefore became a synonym for empowerment, solidarity and the unified fight for a de-stigmatisation and basal rights, which the annual Christopher-StreetDay is remembering.
Still today – 50 years later – violence and repression by the police against queers exists. The violence is structural, institutional and interpersonal, and especially affects Queers of Color and queer refugees (for whom it is especially hard to get recognized by the racist departments in Germany), gender-non-conforming people, trans* and intersex people, as well as others whose form of life do not conform to societal norms.
Just as it was then, the violence is still directed against left-wing places and houses that – like the Stonewall Inn – are safe-spaces for queers. It is expressed in legislation and gender assignments, in processes of racialization and the privileging of specific family and relationship designs. For many, living a queer life is still linked to the hurtful experience of being marked as other and less valuable. Queer’s still experience pathologization and hatred, which can be directed against one’s own queer identity in the mirror of hetero- and cis-hegemonial normations of bodies, life forms and forms of love, and then darkens the forces and energies that are actually within us.
Especially of young LSBT*IQ*a lot is being demanded in our society: to develop a positive relationship to oneself inspite of representational invisibility and hetero- and cis-normative concepts of the normal and the beautiful. These restrictive notions of naturalness restrict our dreams and possibilities of existence. Due to embodiments, they exclude people from the realm of humanity, reject forms of the livable, racialise and pathologise them. They teach people to despise themselves – their own sexuality, their own identity.
Normality is fueled by queer-hostile and antifeminist notions of body, identity, family and sexuality, which functions as an important junction for both bourgeois-moderate milieus and fundamentalist currents up to the extreme right and unites them as an interface. Even 50 years after Stonewall, the fight for the right to exist is still an everyday struggle for many queers. Unfortunately this does not seem to play a big role on the big Berlin CSD. Between the Bundeswehr, Axel Springer Verlag and Bayer AG it seems hardly possible to place political content here any more. Rather, the great Berlin CSD is an example of how some queer structures enter into dangerous alliances with a neoliberal, toxic system that is still largely queer-hostile. Marching are those institutions and corporations that contribute to making life more insecure for queers. These are structures and institutions that are pillars of a neoliberal-capitalist, hetero-cis-normative and racist systems that primarily integrates queer subjects into its own privilege structures when they are as white as possible, cis and bourgeois
adapted, and are suitable for constructing a homophobic, racist-marked individual as deviant others of a supposedly liberal and enlightened, western-modern society.
The great Berlin CSD is also impressive proof that queer communities and their structures themselves are anything but free of discrimination and assault. Again and again people get comments for their bodies, their way of dressing or have to expect to be touched against their will.
With our demo we want to create a place that hopefully means more security for many queers than the big CSD can provide. We want to take the fight for a society where queers can be proud of themselves – and not in spite of or against a heteronormative system. For us this means a reappropriation of Pride and its renewed political charge in opposition to a largely depoliticized, commercial party parade. Let’s get critical – Pride is political! Some of us still fight for their basic rights to exist!