Is history slowly repeating itself?

I've been interested in LGBT history for years, since I worked in London actually. During my time working in the sexual health field I ended up researching the history of the HIV epidemic and the Stonewall riots; two very pivotal points in the LGBT timeline. As soon as I started my research I became completely fascinated with it all.

I was doing the research for a presentation that I was doing at a conference, it was called 'Empowering the community'. I wanted to look at how the Stonewall riots and HIV epidemic both empowered communities in the UK and across the globe to think about their civil rights and to think about their sexual health and make changes.

At the time I arranged to meet with many different members of the LGBT community who had either been in the UK as the effects of the Stonewall riots started to embrace English soil causing the community here to stand up and be heard or they had personal accounts of what it was like to live in the UK during the first few years of the HIV epidemic.

To get first hand information from real people who had been there and experienced it all was so humbling to me. I couldn't be who I am today without them, so many thanks to them and countless thousands of others who had stood up, battled, bled, lost their lives, fought the system and created change.

I've always said that without knowledge of our history we will be unprepared for the future and with everything that is currently happening across the globe, I have to ask; 'is history about to repeat itself?'.

With Chechnya kidnapping and holding gay men hostage, killing a number of them and setting up concentration camps, Russia removing LGBT propaganda, gay rights and changing laws and now America promoting the religious freedom bill at the expense of gay and trans rights and the passing of state bathroom bills that are based on some homophobic irrational and uneducated fear that endangers transpeople. It feels like the tides have turned somewhat for the LGBT community. Not everywhere I must add, but certainly too many countries are passing laws or have already done so that directly affect who we are and how we live.

I'm currently reading the book in the picture (Stonewall by David Carter) its an amazing read and I couldn't help but notice some similarities between the lack of gay rights accounted in the book and what is happening right now in 2017. Two quotes jump out at me, the first is in the Prologue and it reads:

'Not one law-federal, state or local-protected gay

men or women from being fired or denied housing.'

Sound familiar?

The other is more of a war cry, from Oscar Wilde in a letter to George Ives, its quoted in the book and reads:

'I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is

long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms.'

So I put this to each and everyone of you reading this blog, stand up, be counted, be heard. We can't allow these atrocities to happen to our communities here or across the globe. Remove the commercialism from Pride, make Pride about what it used to be, sending a strong message of unity to our haters and oppressors.

Let's stand in the light, together, because together we are stronger and unstoppable.