FGB III: Thoughts on Parada

A post by Kevin at Citizen Crain on the Sao Paulo Pride festivities, weighted with gloom and doom, and a certain amount of schadenfreude. He seems troubled by the fact that Parada, as it is called, is not only the largest gay celebration in the world, but the most chaotic.

It's almost surreal to stare into the enormity of the annual São Paulo gay pride parade (known here simply as the "Parada") and to see within that image the past, present and possible future of the gay movement in the United States all at the same time. The picture is a mash-up of self-discovery and self-destruction, incredible power and pathetic weakness, great hope and miserable failure. And we should all be drawing lessons from it.

Why? Why should we be drawing lessons from it? That's my first question. It's a celebration. Perhaps it's not the celebration that Kevin thinks it should be, but then, he's not in control of it. From the looks of things, no one is, but that's not unusual in this world. In fact, it's more or less normal.

By comparison, Chicago's Pride weekend, which is a lot more organized than Sao Paulo seems to be, is pretty dull. Well, not the weekend so much, but the parade. But it's remained for the past 30-odd years a smallish (if 250,000+ people can be termed "smallish") neighborhood festival. There are sporadic moves to relocate it downtown, which I oppose -- I like having it in the neighborhood, and I don't see what moving it downtown would do for us. I'm funny that way: it's our celebration.

Kevin seems upset at the lack of "message." I think maybe he's just not seeing it.

But with all these incomparable strengths, what is most remarkable about São Paulo pride is its utter failure to articulate even the most basic message. Beyond a few pronouncements and a banner or a website, a coherent message of any kind fails to reach anyone in the street. Instead, the Parada is a sea of drunken recklessness, criminal violence and disturbing overcrowding which has begun to actually drive the resident gay population of the city away from it. The organizers are very competent in breaking world attendance records, but are hopelessly inept at finding some way to truly organize the attendees around any sense of mission or purpose beyond getting loaded, and getting laid.

What else are parties for? Seriously. I don't see why everything has to be a political event. There's lots of room at a Pride celebration, but remember one thing (which I will probably keep hammering on): it's a celebration, and like an Irish funeral, it's likely to be pretty exciting. (Speaking of Irish, the St. Patrick's Day parade in Chicago is notorious for the drunken brawling that seems an integral part of it. I mean, people bar-hopping from 9 am on. I doubt that Sao Paulo is anywhere close.)

But back to the main thread: why does there have to be a serious mission at a Pride parade? Sorry, but that's an assertion that I can't take as a given -- it's got to have some backing, some clearly articulated reason why the celebration of who we are has to have a message other than "this is who we are." I'm reminded of nothing so much as those in the US who seem to feel that drag queens and leathermen should be excluded from the parades (even though they would never say so -- publicly) because they give a "bad impession" of the gay community. No, they don't. They're as much a part of the community as the PFLAG marchers or the bar floats. Deal with it.

And, when it comes right down to it, what message is Kevin proposing we focus on? He doesn't seem to offer one.

Kevin seems to see the negatives:

My understanding of gay pride events is that they provide a zone of safety for gay people to come out and feel more confident and secure against a tide of intolerance in society. Ironically, at the biggest such event in the world, gay people feel ever more insecure and unsafe. Last year's Parada was marred by a brutal, anti-gay murder in the heart of the Jardins neighborhood just hours after the event ended. A gang of "punks" picked out a man at random outside a gay bar/restaurant and stabbed him to death right on the sidewalk. The police hunted down the perpetrators and began cracking down on gangs as a result.

But this year, the death of a 25 year old gay Brazilian has come to symbolize the growing failure of this event to leave any sense of greater meaning behind than a sense of insecurity, distraction and self-destruction.

Sorry -- does he have any evidence for this? Any surveys? Exit polls from the circuit parties? All I see evidence of here is institutionalized party-pooping. Yes, it is horrific that a gay man was murdered by a gang after the parade. It happens enough that it's not unusual, and usually the thugs don't even need a parade as an excuse. And it's terribly sad that such a vibrant young man died from what looks like an accidental drug overdose. Frankly, to use these two incidents (and I'm sure they're not isolated, but they don't seem to be defining, either, to anyone except Kevin) as an excuse to slam the Parada for not being virtuous enough is pretty damned cheesy.


And my understanding of Gay Pride is somewhat different. I've always seen it as containing a strong element of defiance, and the idea that they provide a sense of safety strikes me as odd. Those who want safety, in my experience, tend to stay away -- they might be seen. (Well, this was true in the beginning. Now, everyone wants to be seen at the Pride Parade.) But the Parade -- and I assume the Parada -- are not about safety. They are about defiance, strength in numbers, joy, and celebration (there's that word again). There's always been a certain "fuckyouness" to the very idea of Gay Pride: it's us standing up and telling the world "We're here, we're queer, deal with it!"

I get emails from American gays fairly often which tell me of a rising level of disgust at gay politics in the United States. To many of them, it is run by a group of hacks who lack vision and courage, who cater to politicians of both parties that have no qualms about throwing us overboard. And these critics are not outraged so much as ready to turn their backs on something that was once an inspiring movement full of hope and joy. One of them, an activist who started in the 1980s, wrote me that she felt like she was watching "my baby, all grown up, just laying there dying and I can't do anything about it."

Today, I read a comment by a Brazilian posted today on the gay news portal, MixBrasil. The frustration I saw in it matches the frustrations in emails from back home. And I wondered, will we end up defeating ourselves more handily than our enemies, simply because we don't have a message anymore?

So here we get to it -- Gay Pride is just an extension of the Human Rights Campaign and its black-tie dinners. (And why didn't I see this coming?) Look, I'm as unhappy with the national gay rights organizations as anyone, especially with HRC, because I think, like Chris Crain, Andrew Sullivan, John Aravosis, any number of other commentators, that they have lost touch with the heart of the movement. They completely missed the boat on the marriage issue, and their rationale -- working on nuts-and-bolts issues first -- while it makes a certain amount of sense, puts them in the position of attempting to control the movement, not of working to further our cause. There's a difference. Yes, people are frustrated with gay politics as it used to be run. Excuse me -- have you heard of the Internet? Gay politics is not a matter of black-tie-dinners any more (which organizations such as HRC, GLAAD and a few others would do well to learn, and learn fast). It's the major gay bloggers, gay news on the Web, and even the little guys like me making their thoughts known to anyone who wants to listen. No filters, no carefully worded press releases, no sucking up to politicians, no pulling punches. That's gay politics today.

And maybe that's why Kevin is so disappointed in Parada: as a reflection of "gay politics" (and I remain unconvinced that it needs to be), it's not old-style, which is to say organized, top-down, focused on message (and just exactly which message is it supposed to be focused on? We have many messages), and controllable.

No, thank you. I like this yeasty, messy thing we've developed here, and I like the way it's reflected in our celebrations. I hate the violence, but we don't start it, usually. (In fact, I don't know of an instance where we have.) I hurt for people like Lucas as much as I hurt for anyone whose life is cut short. How is that a function of Gay Pride?

Kevin closes with an e-mail from a friend (his translation):

When I went to my first gay pride (in São Paulo) seven years ago, it was an incredible experience. It wasn't perfect, of course, but everyone tried however possible to make that parade really be something to be proud of, and set a real goal to gain visibility and tolerance in society. Last year, when I went to it with a friend, after two hours trying to walk along one of the floats, we decided it was impossible because of the number of people and we gave up and went home. Now at home, thinking about the parade, we also feel like we don't have that sense of pride when we left the party, as it's no longer the party it was. Today I live in London and I compare the gay scene of São Paulo with the one here, and I have to say that for all the ways our scene is better, it has a lot of growing up and learning to do. Along with this, after reading the details here and on other sites, and the comments of some friends, I have to say I'm disappointed to see our parade and it's not even Paulista or even gay, it's been turned into a party that sadly promotes just the opposite of what it proposes. Tourists coming to São Paulo to hit the parties in the clubs instead of going to Avenida Paulista, people afraid to get up on the floats or dress up for fear of some kind of retaliation - robbery, crimes, violence and breaking the rules of its own participants is shameful. We have to be more aware and do something that really lives up to being proud.

Look, I'm sorry they feel that way, but that's not the whole picture by any means. That's their reading, their interpretation, of an event that didn't fit their expectations, whatever those were. I've marched, ridden floats, or just watched the parade for over thirty years now, off and on, and no, it's not the same as it was thirty years ago: we have politicians marching now, and support groups, and church groups, and gods know what else, as well as the drag queens and nearly-naked dancers and leathermen (and -women), because they all want to be part of this.

This is who we are: vital, lively, colorful, unruly, unorthodox, sometimes lawless, sometimes fearful, sometimes very brave indeed. And yeah, people still get drunk and puke in the street, have sex in alleys, and get beat up. Sorry we haven't all turned into a bunch of bourgeois bores, but there's room for those, too.

You may have gathered that I think Kevin's post is pretty much wrong-headed. There are many messages at Pride celebrations, just as there are many facets to our community. I'll readily admit I'm resistant to the idea of focusing on "a message" for something like a Pride parade. That smacks too much of organized movement politics, which haven't been all that successful lately.

One thing about this that keeps stirring at the back of my mind, and it's something I run into again and again in reviewing: how much of what you're seeing is what you're looking for, and how much was actually put there for you to see?