It’s Pride Season, and that always puts me in a contemplative mood.
I guess I should start by saying that I was a late bloomer. I didn’t grok that I was bisexual until I was about 21 years old. In my defense, sex education and mainstream culture in the 1990s had left me with the impression that bisexuality was something that only existed in women (and let’s not even get started on all the transphobia that my genderqueer ass is still struggling to sort out). I didn’t go to my first Pride Parade 2007, after I moved to St. Louis, in part to come out of the closet. I didn’t have much experience with the community. I was still pretty fresh out of the closet, still pretty ignorant of most politics.
It was a lot spectacle. I took hundreds of pictures with my first digital camera, a ViviCam3705. It meant a lot to me to go with the folks of BASL, to see and be seen. I bought my first pride jewelry. I had my first “what do you mean you want to have an actual conversation before I suck your dick” encounter with a gay man. It was wild.
Fast forward a decade and change. I haven’t been to a Pride festival or parade in years. There are a lot of reasons for this. Part of it is that I’ve always worked weekends — even in shops where not every jeweler worked Saturday and/or Sunday, I’ve found myself in the position of Weekend Jeweler. Part of it is poverty — in Kansas City, unlike St. Louis, Pride is a ticketed event, and the venue they chose previously was one whose policies made bringing your own food and beverages difficult. Part of it is my growing sensitivity to heat — I had made plans to meet my friends at Pride after work, last year, but heat exhaustion defeated me.
Part of it, though, is that I don’t like the direction Pride has taken. I’m a history-minded queer, you know. I know that the modern liberation movement began with a riot sparked by police brutality. I know that many of the first Pride festivals were Gay-Ins — massive displays of public queer affection meant to confront, shock, outrage. It wasn’t that long ago that half the states in the country passed constitutional amendments in “Defense of Marriage“. You can still be fired or murdered anywhere and everywhere in the country for being too visibly queer (particularly if you’re a woman of color).
So it bothers me that Pride events have been taken over by corporations that profit off queer trauma survivors’ and queer youth’s abuse of alcohol (without doing anything for the movement besides some PR stunts and HR handwringing). It bothers me that people are advocating for larger police presences at Pride festivals and parades. It bothers me that, in most parts of the country, Gay Liberation (a phrase that, when it was coined, was every bit as radical and frightening as queer anything) has become LGb(t) Assimilation.
And yet … cops whinging to be included in Pride parades is an improvement over clockwork raids of gay bars. Corporate sponsorship / takeover of Pride festivals is better than every single queer knowing that his, her, or their job was at stake if anyone, ever, found out. Assimilationism is better than countless lives swallowed by sham marriages. But … those aren’t the only options, are they?
I oppose the institutions of marriage and military service. And, yet, I demanded an end to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell because, so long as the institution of the military exists, it’s better that queers be allowed full participation. I demanded Marriage Equality for the same reason. Being able to imagine a better world does not mean we cannot or should not celebrate victories in this one.
Unlike marriage and the military, Pride is not an institution with roots in previous civilizations. Pride is a late 20th Century bid for revolution. The Gay Liberation Front, formed mid-riot, was as opposed to the Vietnam War and to poverty as it was to the oppression of queer people. Thus, marriage be damned, Pride’s assimilation by mainstream capitalist and imperial forces is a betrayal of its own roots — a clear case of winning a few battles while ultimately losing the war.
I don’t have any answers here. No thesis. Just hard questions about goals, tactics, strategy.
Remember that the Nazis burned the library of Magnus Hirsfeld’s Institue for the Science of Sexuality, setting back sexual science and queer liberation by at least a hundred years. Remember that in mid-19th century United States, the police systematically raided gay bars for fun and profit. Remember that Reagan (and most USians) ignored the AIDS crisis for more than a decade, figuring that the queers deserved to die.
I dream of a better world, but I don’t know how to get there.
I believe in Pride. The procession. The pageantry. The mad Dionysiac revel of it. The seeing and being seen, our warts and asses (sometimes literally) on display beside our vital life and joy. But it needs less Bacchanalia and more Sporagmos; fewer drunken satyrs, more maenads tearing blasphemers limb from limb.
When you dance for Pride, you dance for the dead. Don’t let our murderers and their sympathizers turn a profit off of you. Don’t let their successors use you as a public relations prop.