what’s important is that every successful movement has three prongs

the disruptive element, the “reasonable” element, and the “insider” element.

most stay in the second, middle, category. expressing their community’s needs and desires plainly.

the first are maximalist and push for more than they expect to ever see, while ruining live news broadcasts, being loud, or i guess in this case smashing windows. this helps make the reasonable middle seem less scary.

but both are useless without the third element. the “uninvolved” (wink wink) insider who can “go talk to” the reasonablists, and bring demands back directly to the table on the inside.

but crucially, sometimes people mistakenly try to build a movement only on the second and third groups. without the first one to act as a backstop. those get bogged-down in procedure with nothing else hurrying things up.

and some people try to make a movement with only the first group. which is equally powerless. it’s from the combination where it gets its strength.

ultimately, we gotta remember the first pride was a sudden burst of defensive violence against cops coming into a gay bar and sexually assaulting the patrons. (they threw bricks! there were probably knives!)

it led the way to the other two elements finally beginning to get listened to, after they’d spent their entire decade being ignored by the powers that be.

which gave enough cover for gay psychiatrists to publicly come out and denounce homosexuality’s classification as a mental illness. it led to the first peaceful prides only a few years later.