Perhaps you took my comment a little too literally. I'm not advocating a celebration of a NY City bar. Search wikipedia for National Day, and you'll see virtually every country on earth celebrates a declaration of independence or revolution (one major exception is Germany's unification day). Obviously, they are not celebrating the killing of fellow humans, just as Stonewall Day isn't celebrating violence or a bar in NYC, just as Bastille Day isn't celebrating a prison fortress.
Every country/people has a celebration of themselves via independence or a patron saint or something similar. None is called a pride event--pride is just one element of the celebration.
I see your point, but I question the wisdom of taking a nationalist model rather than creating our own model. I mean, we GLBTs don't celebrate our independence from a conqueror or colonist; we don't celebrate the founding of an autonomous nation; we do, in a way, celebrate a revolution for freedom
within our own nation that had its most dramatic turning-point at Stonewall, but that revolution is still going on, forty-odd years later... rather premature to celebrate it as successful.
And if you consider nationalist "diaspora" holidays like St. Patrick's Day, Cinco de Mayo, and Columbus Day, celebrated by immigrant groups but not really celebrated in their countries of origin... you have to question the wisdom of celebrating such nebulous persons and dates.
I mean, it's questionable if St. Patrick ever even existed, and certainly mythological that he drove the snakes from Ireland. And do people even care about why they wear green, do they care about the history of the Irish-American? No, they just drink green beer until they fall on their faces. And what about Cinco de Mayo? It celebrates a turning-point in Mexico's battle for independance from France, but how many people even know what that battle was called, or who won, or what it's all about? Most folks take it as a reason to drink cerveza until they fall on their faces. And Columbus Day is just... well, the jury is still out on the relevance of Columbus in our national conscience, nobody celebrates it anymore (except in NYC), he's gone from a hero of discovery to a villain of colonialism in two generations.
So why should we follow
these examples? Having the historical information in the name of the day doesn't help educate people...
I know about these things, have looked some of them up on Widipedia in fact, because I'm a smartypants; but most people don't bother. And tying the concept of community pride to an object or a person or a date can be
counterproductive if that object or person or date falls into disrepute.
I certainly don't want the history of the Stonewall Riots to fall into the mists of time, but I really don't see how calling our parades and festivals "Stonewall" instead of "Pride" will help that.
We need to be educating our own young people about Stonewall, about the Mattachine Society and the Kinsey Report and Harvey Milk and Lawrence v Texas and a lot of other milestones in our history. They aren't going to get it in school, are they? But to educate anyone, you have to get their attention. "Stonewall Parade" doesn't get anybody's attention... sounds too architectural, too Civil-War-y, too inaccesible as a concept if you don't already know what it means.
From a purely marketing point of view (and in these media-saturated days, what other point of view is there), "Pride" is a better word than "Stonewall." It has strength, it has pow, it's easy to work into song lyrics. Not so much Stonewall... what rhymes with Stonewall?
Very well put. Simply because pride is an antonym of the word shame - and there is no shame in being Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual or Transgendered.
