Stonewall Nation | Hacker News Reader

Stonewall Nation

en.wikipedia.org

58 pointssamclemens42 comments

I understand this desire especially today. Less driven by lack of equal rights/access to education.

But more that I think we've lost a lot of community and the built in 'family' that LGBTQ people build together, often because of rejection from biological family which is becoming far less common.

With the mainstreaming of gay culture we've lost gayborhoods and our spaces have been opened up. Plus with more acceptance non-queer spaces are more accommodating too.

I personally think increasingly appropriated & co-opted. by straight white women in particular e.g. obnoxious bachelorette parties who treat our spaces as zoos and us as animals: honnnnney yasss queen vomiting on drag queens without tipping behavior lol.

Lesbian spaces have basically disappeared even in NYC there are only a couple left.

Funny, this describes the immigrant experience pretty well too. First generations struggle to fit in and are forced to build strong communities, but after one or two generations, they are comfortable and accepted in the mainstream culture (sometimes).

I had never thought of LGBT as immigrants to their own country.

It's maybe best thought the other way. Immigrants are minorities.

Totally!

I think it's more than struggle to fit in though, just like immigrants it was (is in some places) active discrimination and exclusion.

It's funny the amount of people who identify as Irish or Italian that just a few generations later treat the new ostracized communities with discrimination just like their ancestors were.

I've seen a lesbian club handle this by have some nights as "lesbian only" (policed by "face control" aka the door bitch and bouncer) and other nights as mixed. It seemed to strike a good balance between mixing the tribes and creating a safe space.

Yeah I've also seen some fundraisers on Instagram. Here in Denver where I live there is one kind of lesbian coffee shop bar place, which seems to do ok.

The gender discrimination at the door thing is interesting. I personally enjoy European bars that are men only (though many for sex purposes) since there are also plenty of other open-to-all spaces.

If you are interested in a similar plan like this that did take over a town and put in their own government, highly suggest watching "wild wild country'. Basically followers of a guru named Rajneesh move to a rural area in Oregon and bring in thousands of followers, they then elect their own mayor and sheriff, not going to say how it ends but an interesting experiment in this type of moving to establish a singular community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Wild_Country

The US has a long history of these sorts of movements. See the entire state of Utah for the most successful one.

This is amazing, and, I assume, tongue-in-cheek:

> According to gay rights activist Craig Rodwell, after the takeover of Alpine County was effected, work to take over the entire adjacent state of Nevada would begin by using the same process, only then involving tens of thousands of gay men and lesbians.

as an example of successful capture of governmental power by private individuals - a city which is basically a fiefdom run by one family and their friends. They had population of something like 50 people, and new people who tried to settle there were actively not welcomed (by the city police). According to wikipedia it looks like some changes were forced upon the city very recently though (if i remember in response to this city scandals CA was mulling 150 people cut-off for incorporation or something like this):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_California#Recent_hist...

"In an effort to modernize the city and stave off the potential threat of disincorporation in the future, for the first time in the city's history Vernon has opened its doors to new residents from the general public."

See also Kiryas Joel, New York:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiryas_Joel,_New_York

I spent some time in chassidic communities in Israel a few years ago; that 13.2 median age figure is very believable.

The Free State Project has a similar plan for New Hampshire.

They successfully took over a New Hampshire town a few years ago. It didn't go well...

The Town That Went Feral | The New Republic - https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...

That story is almost completely made up (bear encounters have been getting similarly worse throughout the state, there's nothing special about that town)

Odd that Wikipedia describes this as a “separatist” movement, when there was no apparent plan to separate from either the state or federal governments. Anyone able to explain that?

> a gay government, a gay civil service.

It was a light hearted attempt to separate the official State from their little community. It wouldn't work in the U.S. You'd probably have to buy an island uncolonized by the British or the U.S to do that properly

Very interesting. Perhaps, since the US is large and population density is (compared to many countries) not so high, this model might lead to more harmonious relations between the different “warring” factions in American society. Less civil unrest, fewer marches, protests, etc. A sort of calming voluntary segregation.

Given the country’s vast size compared to European nations, and individual states latitude for difference, I can’t help but think efforts to homogenise are both unnecessary and unlikely to succeed.

That's exactly the point with smaller country's, where you have much more common interests/problems/culture than in big country's, and that's why i am absolutely against the EU (future united states of europe). Also if the Government is near to the people the can probe much better was has to be done (or not).

My instinct is it would go quite differently. I suspect there might be less civil unrest, but much less harmonious relations in almost any other way. Just a guess of course.

I would have to agree. It's a breeding ground for squabbles over resources and punitive measures against one another.

It should be noted that Malcolm X thought exactly the same. His Nation of Islam's goal was to establish a separate nation for African Americans within North America. [0]

(not agreeing or disagreeing with the idea btw)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_Islam#Black_national...

That factional territorialism can function if the features being selected on can be self-propogating within a community across generations (e.g. language, religion, culture and political philosophies) and concentrated into a specific area. For all of the upsides of the LGBT community, their defining features appear to limit fecundity, are not reliably propagated across generations, and tend to continue to crop up in society at large regardless of their concentration in a community.

Thank you for talking about us like lab animals.

Interesting analysis. The same reasons why it is difficult for LGBT people to form a state appear to also be why they are easily discriminated against across cultures.

In case anybody's interested in trying this, Loving County, Texas has an official population of 64, with 66 people (that's right) casting votes in the 2020 election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_County,_Texas

https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/historical/loving.shtm...

But also according to your link, it has 111 registered voters, a much higher number than the official population. What am I supposed to take away from this? That the census isn't counting people correctly, or that you can be registered to vote somewhere but not live there?

Edit: according to this[1] PDF, Loving County, TX had an official population of 67 in 2000, but the voting data link in the parent comment says that 156 people voted. Hmmm.

[1] https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2000/phc-3-45.pdf

Either the Census count is inaccurate or there's voter fraud.

But what would be the point of committing voter fraud in a county that had 60/66 votes for Trump[1]?

Seems more likely to me that the Census is incorrect or that there is something going on with multiple residences.

[1] https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/texas/

Or some number of the residents are away at college, in the military, or otherwise have an official residence in Loving but are not living there.

“Voter turnout is always a hundred percent, sometimes more” -- https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/not-so-loving-cou...

More likely (given other references in the wikipedia article to "non-resident males") there is a discrepancy between who gets counted as a resident by the county and who can be registered there by the state.

Additionally, Texas might or might not have a habit of purging dead or emigrant voters from their voting rolls, which would skew the number of registered voters.

Lastly, yes, the census is almost certainly an undercount, including in the more (shall we say) government-counting-everybody-skeptical rural regions of the country.

The census only happens once per ten years. Ordinarily I wouldn't expect a region to double in size but if there's only 60 at baseline it's not unreasonable to expect ~60 more in ten years.

A Texas Monthly article[1] from 1997 is cited by the Wikipedia article and alludes to unusual voter residency rules in Texas:

> Thanks to Texas’ domicile law, people who don’t live or work in the county can still vote there if they own a piece of land—and there’s plenty of land in Loving County for sale. “All you need to do is claim one of these little old deserted shacks or even a tree that you can eat your supper under as your own,” says one woman, who asked not to be named. “It’s all perfectly legal.”

The whole article is worth a read. It’s wild. Especially considering it was written before social media.

[1]https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/not-so-loving-cou...

The Census Bureau fuzzes numbers for privacy reasons, which becomes more apparent the small the district is. Liberty Island (home of the Statue of Liberty but no actual people) is listed as having 48 residents for example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-12/data-scie...

It doesn't really work at the city level. You have to control a county. Most Americans really have no idea just how powerful a county sheriff is within their county. They are only 2 levels of command in the executive branch removed from the President.

Or you could control a city in Virginia (Virginia is unique in that all incorporated cities are independent of the surrounding county; all but 3 of the independent cities in the US are in Virginia).

Outside of say a religious cult, or forced migration / war, I'm not sure this is a very viable process. I think for most people moving someplace by choice has to have more than just "hey we're going to make it about people like us".

Religious cult is really a spectrum, but that wasn't exactly the mindset of many American colonists?

Some you could argue were religious cults, but I believe the majority were just wholesale communities who wanted more power for themselves than was possible in their existing communities.

>wasn't exactly the mindset of many American colonists

No doubt, but they also were encountering persecution so there were a lot of motivations.

The sad truth is everyone wants to be around people “like us”. Sometimes realities like economic opportunity supersede but given the choice humanity is quite tribal.

At the end of the article... "It has since been suggested that the entire Stonewall Nation idea was a hoax perpetrated by the Los Angeles GLF to generate mainstream publicity." I don't see the advantage in employing this strategy, it seems risky. You could be fairly confident that you would get criticism from within the gay community about the plan, but nothing more. It would be hard to predict the level of hostile reactions from people outside the community, and how hostile the reactions could get. To take this chance over a hoax sounds implausible.

Edit: I've forgotten how to format on this site, sorry.

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