Recently I joked on Twitter that people who wonder why there's gay pride but not straight pride must live in buildings with alarms that also go off when there's not a fire.
I have a lot of gay followers and I speak a lot about gay advocacy issues without anyone really challenging me, but this time I got one. The same old arguments were brought up: special rights, not equal rights; gays are acting "entitled," etc., and I about lost my top. Instead, I decided to write all the things that I wished I could say every time. Here are the main things I see over and over, and my responses.
Why does there have to be gay pride?
Why? Because even despite all the wonderful advances lately, gays are still hated and discriminated against. In most states, it is legal for your boss to fire you if he finds out you're gay. He can't (legally) fire you just because you're Christian, or black, or a man, or disabled, but he can fire you if you love someone of the same gender. Or if he thinks you might. Many states are trying to make it legal for restaurants or stores to refuse you service if you identify as gay. And we won't even talk about the 76 countries where it's illegal to be gay at all, or the 10 countries where they may kill you for it (Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, and United Arab Emirates). Brunei and Uganda have been working very hard to add themselves to that list.But more than all of that, gay pride is important because all over the United States, people both young and old are being told that their sexuality is something deserving of shame. They are ridiculed, belittled, isolated, abused, beaten, and in some cases, pushed to the extremes of self-harm and suicide. Straight people, gay pride isn't about us saying we're better than you. It's our defiant affirmation that we don't deserve to be shamed for being who we are. It's a rejection of all the shame and abuse and ugliness that we've been made to feel about ourselves. It's reaching out to those who are still suffering, who still feel that shame. There are so many GLBTQ people out there who need to know, who badly need to see and hear, they were not made wrong. They need to be able to see their sexual identity as something good and positive, something both capable and worthy of love.
In some ways, pride is an unfortunate word, because the word has a number of meanings, and not all of them are positive. In Catholicism, pride is one of the seven deadly sins. A prideful person isn't an admirable one; no one likes someone who puts himself above everyone else. This isn't that kind of pride. It's the kind that announces: I have personal worth. I have self-respect. I am worth love, worth being treated as though I am as good as anyone else. If you have grown up without the need to hear others like you speak that message, without the need to affirm it yourself, then you are blessed. Not everyone has grown up with that blessing.
If there's a gay pride day, why not a straight pride day?
People with minority status hear variants on this argument a lot. (Why not white history month?)Many people--myself included, as a child asked their parents, "If there's Mother's Day and Father's Day, when is Children's Day?" The answer was inevitably, "Every day is children's day." Why not a straight pride day? Why not a straight pride parade? Because you don't need it. The entire world caters to you all the time. The possibility of marrying and having kids is something you take for granted. When you go out in public with the person you love, you don't have to worry about the reactions of someone who might see you holding hands. You can have dinner together on Valentine's Day without strange looks. Nearly every couple you see on television is of your sexuality, and the fact that you like the opposite sex is not played for laughs, nor are you typecast as a particular stereotype because of who you love. All of society, all around you, will function on the assumption that you are a heterosexual. All marketing will pander to you. All your coworkers will understand your relationship. You will never, ever have to think about hiding the fact that you are straight. In many other ways, your life may be difficult, but your sexuality will never be one of them.
Many straight people take this for granted without even realizing it. It's so engrained in their psyches that if gays try to have just one day during which the general public atmosphere is about them, straights feel like it's an injustice. They feel like the gays are getting something special. They start complaining that gays are acting "entitled."
Look at how sinister and ugly that word looks in context. We're not entitled? Not even to one day? Not one parade? Not one moment where we can feel free and open, where we can dance and get a little drunk and dress like ourselves and kiss each other and do all the things in public that straight people do all the time without anyone ever commenting or complaining? That is exactly why we do need gay pride. We are entitled, as human freaking beings.
When you protest this, what you are really saying to us is, "Society should be about us all the time. This day doesn't explicitly include us, and that makes it unjust." This attitude is, frankly, kind of appalling. It's like walking out of a restaurant after a big meal, and getting mad at someone feeding the hungry because you didn't get a free sandwich. And that is the very definition of entitled--the attitude that if anyone anywhere is getting something, you deserve a piece.
Why do they have to be so flamboyant? This isn't helping their public relations!
Okay, let's be honest here. You aren't really concerned about the public relations, deep down, are you? Are you working in gay PR? Are you struggling to advance the cause, and all these raunchy gay pride parades keep stymieing your efforts? I'll lay money on that not being the case. I know what's really bothering you, because it used to bother me too: that these people are behaving in ways that you find rude, distasteful, or flat-out gross. That this isn't proper behavior, and it needs to stop.
I am going to be 100% honest here. I used to feel this way at Pride parades. I used to look around at people who were acting overtly sexual, or dressed in fetish gear, or just plain raunchy, or outright naked, and cringe. But I wasn't really concerned about how the public would view gays overall. Not really. I was concerned about how they would view me. I was concerned that my dad or my coworker would look on the news and see an image of a drag queen with an enormous prosthetic dildo raunchily miming sex with a priest on a public thoroughfare, and lump me in with them.
But here's what I didn't get, and what a lot of people still don't get: Gay pride parades are not about public relations. I mean come on, it's called the Gay Pride Parade, not the Tone It Down So We Can Get Along Parade. And you don't tone it down for a parade! You live it up! Dear outside world, when will you finally stop demanding that gay pride be about you? It's not about you. Don't get us wrong. We'd adore having you there. We cherish your love and support, and every single one of you that comes to our parade to cheer us on means the world to us. But we're not there to get along with you. It's the one day a year when if you want to play, you have to get along with us. And we have to get along with each other. This is the message of gay pride: you can be yourself. You can open up. Let your freak flag fly. The closet has no hold over you anymore.
And hey, younger me, listen: that goes just as much for the priest-ramming drag queen that you disapprove of so much. Your disapproval means nothing. When you go to the parade, your comfort level is your own damn business. When you say, "Tone it down," or, "Don't be so flamboyant," what you are really saying is: "Hey! Back in the closet, you. Maybe not all the way. Just a little. No, a little more than that. LIT-tle more. There. Now you're the right level of Out." And you have no right to do that.
GLBTQ people spend their whole lives having to conform in large and small ways to the expectations of a society that still largely believes they should just shut up and be straight or at least pretend, damn it. Pride parades aren't about PR. They're a freaking break from it. For once, we get to let go of what anyone else thinks. For once we get to shut out the coworkers who expect us to smile and listen while they talk about girls, the teachers who tried to make us act more "feminine," the parents who ask themselves where they went wrong and mean us.
We work on PR the other 364 days. For the most part, those are still yours. We're not giving this one back.
Also, it's fun.
Seriously, have you been to a Pride parade? They're awesome. Sure, you're gonna see more skin than maybe you're prepared for, but who are you anyway, Queen Victoria? If you come down and laugh and dance and are ready to have a good time, you will be drawn in. Pride parades are like this big ocean of positive, happy vibes that are ready to lift you up and carry you off to Joy Island. Why on earth would you want to stop that? Who are you letting down if you shrug all that disapproval off your shoulders and just stop caring about it all for once? Wouldn't it be better to cheer? To dance?
