A question of pride: Should LGBTQ cops march in uniform? by kadiatubman
When Jay Brome was a California Highway Patrol officer, he never marched in uniform at an LGBTQ pride parade. It wasn’t allowed. He would never be able to because, after 20 years on the job, he was forced to leave.
Brome said he “tried to just ignore it like I've done most of my life,” but he instantly recalled a traumatizing moment of harassment in the academy: a gun-takeaway training session with another cadet whose unloaded weapon he had to wrestle away. But worse, he said, “I wouldn't get backup, which wears on you when you're at scenes and you call for backup and people don't show up, because then it's your life. The message was perfect, clear, to shut up and do your job.”
“I had to leave about 10 years early,” he said. “So I lost 10 years of retirement, 10 years of pay, 10 years of overtime.” The relationship between the LGBTQ community and police has long been frayed. Since the 1969 Stonewall riots, which were born from police raids and abuse in New York City gay-friendly spaces, LGBTQ communities have resisted police. The gay liberation movement organized the first “gay pride” march a year after the uprising, in resistance against oppression by police.
The group took offense that “Heritage of Pride did not act as an advocate for the community against the NYPD, but instead saw themselves as partners with the NYPD.” Pride organizers acknowledged that debates around the issue of law enforcement groups marching in pride events are not unique to New York City.
On-duty officers guard pride events for security, as with most public gatherings in major cities. And since the 2016 mass shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, LGBTQ activists have called for heightened security at pride events, including more police. “Oftentimes the people that say that they need police around them to feel safe tend not to be part of a persecuted minority group racially or in terms of immigration status. They tend to be white people,” said James, whose coalition will be hosting its own march, the Queer Liberation March, which will run concurrently with the World Pride march Sunday and retrace the route taken in the first gay pride march, in 1970.
For the officers marching in the main pride parade, James, like Brome, advised them to “put your queer identity forward, put your police identity or your work identity to the back, recognize there are people in this community, the LGBTQIA+ community, that have been victimized and even killed by the NYPD. And in consideration and respect to those victims and their families and friends, put your queer identity forward.
“The first time that I ever participated in pride was marching in my uniform as part of GOAL,” continued Downey. “And for me it was the most liberating thing, because I thought that [for those] people who view the police as the protector of their power and their privilege, I felt like I was bucking the system. It was the ultimate slap in the face to the establishment.”
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