Intersecting months

I sort of did not read Being Heumann for Disability Pride Month, but I sort of did.

Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann (2020)

Technically I did not have a reading list specifically for Disability Pride Month; she was on a different reading list that I have labeled trauma, but it's more complicated than that.

However, as I was working on my capstone I spent a fair amount of time on disability. Also, "Author/Main Character with a disability" was on the Powell's Summer Reading Challenge. It just made sense to move Being Heumann up.

I will probably reference her book again after other books, but the way things worked out I read her book just after Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an Activist by Cleve Jones (2000, with Jeff Dawson), and then there has been some movie watching. It brought some themes together.

Heumann and Jones were both doing their work in the San Francisco area around the same time. In fact, a sit-in they were doing was assisted by Mayor George Moscone about six months before he was murdered, along with Harvey Milk, by Dan White.

The first theme that has really emerged -- which relates to other content as well -- is that the young folks today really don't know how good they have it. They do not know what struggles people have had to go through to get where we are.

Maybe they are less concerned about losing ground because they take this progress -- which is insufficient -- for granted.

The other thing, though, is the building of broad coalitions and the work that goes into that.

When you are reading Jones, you learn about Milk too, who was a mentor to him. 

Some of this may also have been helped by the era. 

One thing that helped with the election of Milk and others to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was a change in the rules where election was by neighborhood. That allowed for greater diversity. That meant a gay man and a Black woman and a single mother who had been a Freedom Rider.

In fact, watching the Civil Rights actions that were televised and publicized not too long ago probably did help,

Regardless, one thing you see with Milk, Jones, and Heumann is working to bring more people in.

There were different challenges. For disability rights, people tended to think of their specific disability. In Heumann's case, she had polio when she was 14 months old and limited mobility because of that. A lot of people had disabilities because of polio back then, but not enough to get the changes they needed on their own. They needed the hearing impaired and the injured and those with congenital disabilities... everyone.

You do still hear about racism at events for gay men, and I was surprised to read about the solidarity with lesbians from back then. I had gotten the impression that it was not the norm, at least in the 80s and 90s. Well, maybe it wasn't the norm in the 70s either, but it was something that Milk and Jones did. 

There were people who tried, and they were people who did good things.

There are lessons for us if we will take them.