(the opening speech)
Welcome everybody – every body. Welcome to our first public appearance. We are Working Class Queeroes – a new collective of queers based in Berlin, who’re fed up with pinkwashing, patriarchy, hetero-normativity and the whole rotten, vile system of class, exploitation, domination, perpetual war, surveillance and environmental destruction that’s still running the Show – Show with a capital S. But tonight’s our show and we want to dedicate it to our bad-ass queer forerunners in NYC 1969, who for nights in a row rioted against the hardcore hetero-normative oppression they had suffered their whole lives: the phobic, hateful and chauvinist prejudice in society; the institutionalized, government-sponsored pathologization, marginalization, and exclusion; exploitation by the mob and last but not least police harassment.
With today’s event we don’t only want to collectively commemorate Stonewall Riots’ working class queeroes; we aim to counter the mainstream, liberal-capitalist LGBT narrative and its appropriation of Stonewall’s historical significance. Reclaim Stonewall! Liberation is not assimilation into any institutions and practices of social domination. Queer liberation is human emancipation – which does not correspond with, for example, a license to manage a niche market of products and services directed to “queer folk;” nor “equality of opportunity” to rise in the echelons of a class-based social pyramid; nor conscription into an expansionist system’s military; nor conforming our relationships to an imitation of state and/or church sanctioned hetero-normative family standards. Fuck no. The struggle is anti-war; the struggle is queer feminist; the struggle is anti-racist; the struggle is ecological; the struggle is against domination, authoritarianism and for the better world we in our hearts know is possible.
We hope you will enjoy the movie as much as we did.
After the screening we will open for a discussion round and continue thereafter in the bar area, which will be open at all times.
Enjoy.
