On Sunday, I had a great exchange with friend and former PASC staff member Saige Martin. He indicated that he would never attend a Pride parade so long as they continued to be the gaudy, flashy, decadent events they often are. In his view, such events provided fodder for the Right's efforts to continue the systematic oppression of the LGBT community. Saige would like to see Pride parades that show community members as normal people wearing normal clothes and acting in ways that the broader society would consider socially acceptable. In Saige's eyes, such parades would go a long way to erasing negative stereotypes and help the efforts of activists like himself to ensure full equal treatment for people of all sexual orientations.
(I've tried to summarize Saige's argument as best I can. Saige, if you read this, please feel free to clarify anything I got wrong.)
In case you couldn't tell from my entry on the Sexcamaids, I feel a lot more positive towards Pride. As pessimistic as I can be on a lot of issues, I am very optimistic that Western society is moving towards personal liberty, at least on social issues. Each year, more and more people seem willing to accept other people's lifestyles, so long as they do not harm someone else. We've clearly got a long way to go, but relative to where we were even 20 years ago, we're moving in the right direction.
And society owes a lot of this progress to the LGBT community. I am no expert on the history of personal expression in the Twentieth Century, but here's how I see it: after the backlash against the social movements of the 1960s, most groups stopped pushing the envelope and started to work for more incremental solutions, solutions that the mainstream society could accept. Word to them. That's one, completely legitimate way to achieve social change. Certainly, parts of the LGBT community adopted that strategy.
But other parts of the LGBT community seemed unwilling to compromise. Given even the tiniest opening as a result of the upheaval in the 1960s, certain people decided that they could not nor would not go back to the way things were and that they needed to allow their personality to flower in full. I see Pride as an outgrowth of that. The average gay man couldn't strut and preen in public like, oh, Elton John or Liberace...except at selected events one or two times a year, where, if only for a moment, they could express themselves. Hell, they could even go OVERBOARD in expressing themselves. In other words, while the rest of society moved away from expression at all costs, parts of the LGBT community embraced it.
We know how I feel about outlandish public displays of self-expression. But heterosexuals like myself have the privilege of being able to be as flamboyant as we want in public while still enjoying all the rights that come as part of what is deemed as normal and avoiding the stigma attached to being in the out group (no pun intended, but it's pretty good, isn't it?). I can't even imagine the courage it took just to put on a damn costume and dance in the streets during the 1980s and AIDS and all that horseshit.
So, to the LGBT community: thank you. Thank you for pushing the envelope. I know you don't necessarily do it for the broader society, but the broader society needs what you do. It needs to regard gender roles as more fluid. It needs to see that sexuality can be public without being vulgar. It needs so many of the things that it wouldn't acknowledge without you.
PS: I am sure everyone can tell, but I am painfully inexperienced at writing and thinking about issues of sexuality. In referring to the LGBT community, I've tried to use the terms I thought were most accurate or complimentary, but I freely admit I may have used the wrong words at places. Please feel free to correct me so I can get it right next time.
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