Two Perspectives on Pride Month
Are Pride celebrations a distraction, or has the party not gone far enough?
Jamie Paul here. Queer Majority just dropped a new issue: CINEMA, guest edited by Bruce LaBruce. I’ve spent the past few months working on this, and it’s filled with some excellent pieces.
***
This article contains two short essays about the future of Pride Month. When you reach the end of the first piece, keep scrolling.
Pride Cometh Before a Fall
By Timothy Wood
Pride Month inspires the full range of possible excited emotional states. Some people break out the rainbow flags and celebrate at events. Others seethe over queer “degeneracy” and talk about gay sex more than any LGBT person. Meanwhile, major corporations rebrand to incorporate rainbow iconography, at least where LGBT isn’t bad for business. Pride Month has never been more visible and discussed, which means that it carries a burden of seriousness. The movement is no longer in its infancy, but with adulthood comes new responsibilities. Hard-fought rights have been gained — the problem today is that those rights are facing a fierce backlash. Now is the time, to paraphrase First Corinthians, for Pride to put away childish things.
June is Pride Month, but it’s lots of other months too. It’s also National PTSD Awareness Month. Undoubtedly, PTSD is a serious issue, even if some folks have tried to expand it to encompass experiences that cheapen the diagnosis. If you were exposed to an uncomfortable opinion in college, or if someone got your latte order wrong, you probably don’t have PTSD unless you’ve also been stabbed, or abused, or blown up in combat, etc. June is also National Cancer Survivor Month. (They have some-cancer-month almost every month.) June is Acne Awareness Month, National Dairy Month, and Accordion Awareness Month. To balance out the listening demographic, June is also African-American Music Appreciation Month. If there’s a thing, there’s probably a month for it, and there’s a 1-in-12 chance it’s in June.
Calendar dedications are all public relations, but I’ll call it “PR” because it has a more appropriately derogatory connotation. Some will gladly correct me and explain how these special times are actually “consciousness raising”, but that’s just what people who aren’t in marketing call PR.
Life is full of commemorations: birthdays for being older, Christmas when it’s colder, New Year’s, the Olympics, the World Cup, and so forth. You can’t make a movie about baseball without an old guy reminiscing about “the game.” We all have our “where were you” moments: JFK, OJ, 9/11, that time with Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl… There’s nothing wrong with finding meaning in sharing emotional milestones.
There is, however, a difference between commemorating something that happened and celebrating something we hope for. National Reading Month is great, but it doesn’t keep people from burning books. Celebrations don’t make a lot of sense when you’re under attack. Bigotry is on the rise, as are hate crimes and suicides. Hundreds of state-level anti-LGBT bills have been introduced in the past couple years. Same-sex marriage was legalized only by a Supreme Court ruling. It was never codified into law by Congress, just like abortion never was, and that turned out swell. Many states have limited or no statutory protections for LGBT people. What exactly are we celebrating? A month-long party where we fiddle while Rome burns?
Folks born after 1980 have gotten used to marking up historical wins like Civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBT rights. But we’re staring down the barrel of some big fat Ls on the scoreboard. Public support for LGBT protections ticked down recently. That’s the part where “consciousness” was supposed to be “raised” by parades and Pride, so we can continue our inexorable march toward greater equality and personal freedom.
When the bill to ban TikTok passed the House of Representatives in March, 2024, some congresspeople received “as many as 20 calls per minute, leading some offices to temporarily shut down their phone lines.” For the generations who are native to carrying around supercomputers in their pockets, they can mobilize like Seal Team Six when they find a cause they care about. But posting a video about attending a Pride event doesn’t really have the same punch as rendering your representative’s office comically unusable.
Show Pride in the basic respect and human dignity you afford to others for which you ask no price and seek no recognition. If you really want to feel like you’re making a difference, leave someone in your government 70 voicemails until you get a call back. Trust me, they really like that. It’s not annoying to them at all.
Progress is not inevitable, irreversible, or permanent. History does not end. Backslides are gradual by design, and most don’t even realize until it’s too late. The backlash we’re now seeing isn’t coming in the form of Straight Pride parades — it’s being delivered written into law. I live in Kentucky. In my state, hate crimes for sexual orientation have eclipsed hate crimes over religion. The people who are okay with that are going to hammer out bills and ordinances with a half-century attention span, because that’s how long ago Roe v. Wade happened.
The desire to be an inspirational generation has to coexist with the possibility of being a cautionary tale for the future. Pride is counterproductive in as much as it becomes a distraction. Some celebrants may be asleep at the switch. There is something perverse, tragic, and very late-Roman-Empire about putting all this effort into partying while the funeral pyre is being built.
Saint Pridesrick Day
By Jamie Paul
As Timothy noted above, there is indeed a backlash against LGBT people underway. I should know, I’ve been covering it for years. Support for same-sex marriage, same-sex relations, and LGBT legal protections are all declining. The tides may have begun to turn with pushback against contested aspects of trans politics, but of course it didn’t stop there. The shift in the tenor of public discourse is palpable, and folks who five years ago felt pressured into silence when they had nothing nice to say now feel empowered to spew genuine bigotry. Ugly canards about LGBT people being “degenerates” and “groomers” are more commonly encountered online today than they were a decade ago.
Pride Month, too, has come under attack. Religious conservatives, internet-poisoned culture warriors, and other ambassadors of the Republic of Gilead launch coordinated and blistering campaigns against any major company that acknowledges Pride. Right-wing outrage archeologists scour footage and photos of Pride events in search of scantily clad partygoers within eyeshot of children. It’s never been more fashionable, even for liberals and moderates, to pooh-pooh Pride and find some angle to cast aspersions on it. The consensus position seems to be that Pride events are too debauched, and need to moderate — or better yet, fade away. I agree that Pride needs to evolve, but I completely disagree about the direction.
Pride doesn’t need to become less of a party. It needs to become the biggest party there is.
Cinco de Mayo was originally a Mexican holiday commemorating Mexico’s victory over France in the battle of Puebla on May 5th, 1862. Saint Patrick’s Day was originally an Irish Catholic religious festival to honor the patron saint of Ireland. Almost everyone in America now celebrates these two holidays, whether or not they have Mexican or Irish ancestry, and despite knowing little about these holidays’ origins. They have evolved from very specific holidays relevant only to specific subcultures into universal celebrations of watered-down versions of Mexican and Irish culture. Oktoberfest has followed a similar trajectory.
Cultural dilution is a feature here, not a bug. When a festival is opened up to everyone, everyone makes it their own. The original subculture is pulled and stretched in a thousand different directions until it becomes large enough to cover all of society. In the process, it also becomes, by necessity, paper thin. Purists, tribal chauvinists, and cultural separatists hate it when this happens, and that alone is probably as useful an indicator as any that this is a good thing. This whole process is facilitated, as most things in life are, by alcohol. Make something a drinking holiday, and for a day everyone will be Irish or Mexican or German or whatever you want them to be. It brings people together, emphasizes what we have in common, and creates genuine goodwill toward the original group in question. Pride should take a page out of this playbook.
LGBT people have gone mainstream. The current backlash is evidence of that as much as anything else. But while Pride events generally allow anyone who wants to show up, Pride itself remains a decidedly in-group affair — an event for LGBT and by LGBT people, with “allies” as a side feature. But this doesn’t make a lot of sense for a mainstream movement, especially one that is coming under heavy fire in an increasingly hostile climate.
It’s true that calendar dedications are largely PR. And if I were a PR specialist and my client was Pride Month, I’d tell them to throw the gates open, get the booze a-flowin’, and turn Pride in St. Pridesrick Day. Except, unlike St. Paddy’s, it’ll be an entire month of rainbow beer, barbecue street food, and kick-ass block parties. Once it becomes a drinking holiday, enforcing adult-only spaces will also become easier. An inevitable byproduct of this evolution will be a decrease in many of the most niche elements of Old Pride. If we’re all celebrating it, the leather daddies, drag queens, and kinksters will end up getting drowned out in a sea of normies. But if we’re all celebrating Pride, then we’re all celebrating LGBT culture, even if it's a watered-down version.
On March 17th, everyone is Irish. Get some drinks in them, and in June, everyone will be LGBT.
See also: “Performatively Troubled”
Subscribe now and never miss a new post. You can also support the work on Patreon. Please consider sharing this article on your social networks, and hit the like button so more people can discover it. You can reach me at @AmericnDreaming on Twitter, or at AmericanDreaming08@Gmail.com.
 | A guest post by
|
I am tempted to share the second essay so many places. That is the question that I suspect has been bugging people ever since being gay gained some kind of respectability. What (or who) is Pride for? The freaks and assimilationists can't decide. Happens when "do you like kissing other dudes" somehow becomes a political, moral, and social stance. How much of the queer movement's solidarity has been based on common enemy politics?