It's Pride Week

For those of us in the (insert favorite combination of initials) community, that has a lot of different meanings -- no surprise: we're as homogeneous as any other commmunity, which is to say, not.

I may have something to say about this later in the week, but I'm still feeling my way back into writing. To hold you over, I've discovered a couple of posts I think are worth looking at.

First, from Waymon Hudson at Bilerico, some comments on "Putting the Politics Back in Pride".

Over the years, Pride celebrations have shifted from their earlier protest march forms to more celebratory parties as LGBT people have felt safer, come out of the closet, and been more visible in society. Yet even as our parties grew larger, our legal rights and battles for equality have stalled, with major pieces of pro-LGBT legislation languishing in congress. That's why this year is the perfect time to take pride back to it's roots and put the politics and protest back in.

And Joe Jervis has a potent rejoinder to those who want our parades to be like the VFW or something.

But sometimes I think we are the worst people in the entire world when it comes to standing up for each other. The gay people who'd like to soothe their personal image problems by selectively culling some of our children from Pride events? They disgust me. They appall me. They embarrass me. To them I say: The very road that YOU now have the privilege of swaggering upon was paved by those very queens and leather freaks that you complain about as you practice your "masculine" and give us butch face. If you want to live in the house that THEY BUILT, you better act like you fucking know it. United we stand, you snide bitches. America's kulturkampf ain't gonna be solved by making flamboyant people go away.

I'll end this by making one final Jewish reference. Possibly you've heard the Jewish in-joke that sums up the meaning of all Jewish holidays? "They tried to kill us. We won. Let's eat." My Pride version?

They wish we were invisible.

We're not.

Let's dance.

This is the point I've been trying to make for years, but Jervis did it up right. Read it.