Fort Worth bar target of police violence

Patrons at the Rainbow Lounge in Fort Worth, Texas, were recently the target of homophobic police violence. At approximately 1 a.m. on June 28, law enforcement officials entered the neighborhood gay bar on the pretense of investigating the club’s liquor license and began arbitrarily handcuffing customers. Within a few horrific minutes, the police had arrested seven men and brutally assaulted one of them; he was hospitalized for brain injuries after “officers slammed his head into a wall and then into the floor.” (New York Times, July 4)

LGBT community protests violent police raid

The above tragedy occurred on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, a four-day street battle that was incited by a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York City. This historic battle gave birth to the modern LGBT rights movement, which has since made considerable progress: Sexual minorities have won many basic rights, as well as the support of the majority of the U.S. population.

But, as the Rainbow Lounge raid proves, the struggle for equal treatment of people, regardless of their sexual identity, is far from over. Attacks such as these on the LGBT community are neither rare nor new. Law enforcement agencies have long targeted places where sexual minorities congregate in order to terrorize and repress them. More recently, police terror has focused on LGBT venues in poor and oppressed communities, and immigrant LGBT bar patrons are often threatened with arrest or deportation.

The calculated use of violence—slamming someone’s head into a wall and then the floor, for example—is a common practice, and is meant to send a message of fear to the LGBT community as a whole. In spite of their efforts, though, these scare tactics cannot extinguish the movement that was put into motion 40 years ago.

Gay men and lesbians in Fort Worth are fighting back and attracting support from LGBT rights groups across the country. They have organized protests and formed a new organization, Fairness Fort Worth, to keep track of various investigations into the Rainbow Lounge raid that have begun or been requested. They also have taken up collections and organized a benefit concert to help the injured.

On the one hand, capitalism—the foundational basis for LGBT oppression, as well as all other forms bigotry—continues to deny basic democratic rights to much of the population. On the other, liberation struggles, their ranks swelled by the ever-deepening contradictions of capitalism, gain momentum.

The LGBT movement, one such struggle, is experiencing renewed vigor and is continuing to mobilize on a larger scale, partly as a result of outrages such as the assault on the Rainbow Lounge. It will eventually feed into the ranks of the larger movement to end the rule of the super-rich.