About 27 years after the historic Stonewall riots in 1969, San Luis Obispo County celebrated Pride and its LGBTQ members for the first time officially as a community.
This year, to honor the riots’ 50th anniversary, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Center Gallery is displaying A View from Stonewall, an exhibit featuring the photographs of gallery coordinator Lynn Schmidt in conjunction with the annual Central Coast Pride celebration.
“It’s a remembrance,” Schmidt said. “A lot of people don’t understand what Stonewall is and why it’s important. It’s a time to pause and remember that we’ve only been doing this for 50 years and reflect where we’ve been.”
Early in the morning of June 28, 1969, the LGBTQ community in Greenwich Village, New York, spontaneously rioted in reaction to police raids on the Stonewall Inn. Those riots marked a turning point in the movement for civil rights for LGBTQ people in the U.S.
From the Stonewall riots to the 1980s, when Schmidt came of age, to today, the photographer can see the progress that has been made in normalizing LGBTQ people.
“It was very much ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ and ‘yeah, that’s your roommate, OK,'” Schmidt said.
To honor the people who were a part of Stonewall, Schmidt experimented with digitally altering and collaging her photos, a first for the LGBTQ artist.
“I haven’t been too willing before to alter photos from their natural look,” Schmidt said. “I’m allowing myself to manipulate them and get out of my comfort zone.”
While progress has been made in the past 50 years for the rights of LGBTQ people, Schmidt still has concerns about the community’s rights in America currently and in the future. She listed concerns such as the high rates of homelessness and suicide among LGBTQ people.
“I’m amazed at how far we’ve come,” Schmidt said. “I’m distressed by this current [presidential administration],” Schmidt said. “I don’t feel like we’re going back in the closet, but I think the civil liberties of vulnerable people in our community are being targeted.”
The goal of the exhibit for Schmidt is to open people’s eyes to a key part of LGBTQ history.
“I hope people find out a little tidbit that they didn’t know before and to think about where we’ve been before,” she said. “There were sacrifices and a tremendous amount of work that went into getting where we are today.” Ī
Arts Writer Ryah Cooley believes that love is love. Send nice notes only to rcooley@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Pride 2019.
It is in the nature of democracies that previously repressed minorities to tend to clamor for more and more rights up to and often well beyond the point where they begin to impinge on the rights of the majority; but at some point the majority starts pushing back. By now it can be stated with some certainty that in the view of the majority the LGBT movement has gone too far. Opinion surveys attest to this fact: LGBT support crested at well over 50% but has been dropping by roughly 10% per year for several years now.