This one, an opinion piece by someone named Topher Gen at Pink News, I have trouble taking seriously.
And that’s what Pride does; it fuels the flames of hate. Today, Pride is little more than a giant excuse for corporate marketing and a bit of drunken fun. The march claims to ‘celebrate’ its participants’ sexuality, but it’s to its community’s own detriment.
Click through and read the whole thing, if you like -- unfortunately, it doesn't get any more coherent, and Topher Gen seems to be one of those wild-eyed zealots who is going to show us The Way -- his way, which is the only way.
This one is pernicious. This is where the old New Left (your struggle is everyone's struggle, but everyone else comes first) has wound up. The whole cast of this one is negative, marked by a determination to take every aspect of Pride in the worst possible light.
Pride initially represented the cry, “We exist!” shouted from an ignored and stigmatized community to the larger population of the country. It was a celebration of the margins. While this is still the case in some ways, the LGBTQ community has now found itself underwritten by the most oppressive elements of American society—banks, politicians, and corporations, the ultimate ostracizers—and it has largely accepted this. It is a shift almost as dizzying in scope as the shift in mainstream consciousness towards LGBTQ rights. Decades ago, from the margins came a movement, one which has now, years later, unfortunately and almost unblinkingly accepted the subsidy of organizations and individuals that actively enable the perpetual, repressive “othering” of the powerless.
I think we can rather take this funding by major corporations as an indication of how far we've come in gaining acceptance in society at large. To be realistic about it, they're doing it because it's good business. Think about the implications of that for a minute or two. There's also the fact that Pride is not about the 99%. That's not the point. (You're going to see this point made again and again here.)
Speaking of imperialism, even while some supporters cheer Obama for his support of marriage equality in North Carolina—“a day after it could have done some good,” Occupy Chicago organizer James Cox reminded me—I think of the words of Mike Knish: “For every one of us cheering Obama’s entry into the 21st century, there is a pile of dead Afghani kids who don’t give a shit”
WTF? "Speaking of imperialism"? Well, of course he was speaking about imperialism -- why, Gay Pride is all about the fight against imperialism. Just ask any leftist with a high score on the purity index. This reminds me so much of the political speeches after Pride parades in the 80s by the likes of Urvashi Vaid that I'm really wondering if this guy is in a time warp of some sort.
No, Gay Pride is not about Afghanistan.
And what about [Bradley] Manning? The now-famous (increasingly so) whistleblower who allegedly disclosed evidence of US war crimes was honored in the parade with a float from Chicago activist Andy Thayer’s Gay Liberation Network (GLN), which featured a healthy Occupy Chicago contingent among a group of roughly 35. Tunes from a previous anti-war movement—Edwin Starr, John Lennon, and Marvin Gaye—backed the group, which sought to bring political consciousness to an event that seemed, as Cox noted, “more about having fun than trying to achieve any right.” This is to be praised. The problem comes, then, in the GLN’s full and unqualified acceptance of Private Manning as a gay man and not, as is definitely possible, a transgender woman.
OK -- Bradley Manning was honored with a float, but it's a bad thing because it didn't identify Manning as a transgender woman, because he might be.
Do I really have to comment on that?
That's the bulk of it. There are actually comments thanking this idiot for this post, on the order of "the fight for gay rights is the fight for everyone's rights" -- notable because the point is not that everyone should be fighting for our rights, but that we're supposed to be fighting for everyone else's. To be fair, there are also comments pointing out other of the huge flaws in the author's reasoning, and the poster under whose auspices this went up, Kit O'Connell, left a comment that does display the sense of proportion that I find so lacking in the post itself.
The point of this is that these commentaries display the lack of a sense of proportion that I find as endemic on the left as on the right. They are talking about a specific event, and in effect trying to dictate to the rest of us what our celebration is supposed to be, starting with the baseline, which is that all the elements of their agendas must be included. If you follow this blog at all, you know I don't respond well to authority, particularly if that authority is self-bestowed.
Maybe next year I'll write my own post on Gay Pride -- on what it is, not what I think it should be.
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