Pride, the month, the holiday...what does it mean to you?

[LeftWriteFemme]

I was writing to a friend (nycfembbw) today and on a sharp intake of breath wondered to myself had I wished her a Happy Pride, yet? Of course I wished her one immediately, but it got me to thinking about how important June being Pride month has become to me.

I was a slow adapter and didn't quite comprehend the depth of what Gay Pride is for our community and/or for me personally at first, but for awhile now I look forward to a time of celebration, contemplation and satisfaction. Not that don't feel those things all year long, but June holds a special place in my heart now.

I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences concerning the celebration of Pride

and to everyone

HAPPY PRIDE

[nycfem]

I take Pride so much more for granted than I did as a teenager in Ohio. My circle in NYC is so LGBTQ (including my only sibling) that I don't feel the same awareness of Pride month. I looked at the list of groups marching this year in the Pride Parade, and I was most touched to see all the high schools listed. I was the only one out in my high school, and the worker at the LGB hotline in Ohio told me that there was only a group for gay boys because girls don't usually come out that young. It was very isolating, and I did anything to be seen. I had quite the collection of t-shirts I wore and bumper stickers I put on my car: "On a Queer Day You can see forever," "The Goddess is Alive and Magic is Afoot!" and "ACT UP." While the police seemed to frequently stop my car, once I had a woman leave a note to me taped to my car saying how much she and her partner liked seeing my bumper stickers. All of us queers were craving Pride!

Here in NYC I rarely go to the Pride events, wanting to avoid the crowds. This weekend my step-son (BB's son) Jacob and his boyfriend Kevin are coming for the weekend. It'll be nice to be around that youthful gay energy! And tonight BB talked me into going to our LGBTQ synagogue, and I'm looking forward to hearing Kate Bornstein speak (author of books such as Gender Outlaw and HELLO, CRUEL WORLD: 101 ALTERNATIVES TO SUICIDE FOR TEENS, FREAKS, AND OTHER OUTLAWS ). Meanwhile, my mom and I spent all day in stitches (laughing), calling each other and sharing ideas of rhyming made up slogans to encourage condom use (too embarrassing to post here), since she has been assigned to hand out dental dams and condoms at the PFLAG table of the Pride Parade in Ohio.

Remember: It gets better!

Happy Pride to everyone!

[Estella]

I have to say, over the past ten years or so I stopped really feeling the whole Pride thing. I work pretty much every weekend and never make it to the parade anymore which, in Boston at any rate, was becoming mostly church groups and corporate clubs, i.e., "Citizens Bank Wishes You a Happy Pride!" Right. Even the Ramrod toned their float down.

But this year, for some reason, I was really feeling it. I work at a hotel filled with gay men, and this year something just sparked. We were all passing each other in the corridors wishing each other a happy Pride - it was very sweet. So a group of us got together after work at the Fritz block party and met each others' partners and spouses and friends - very impromptu, very casual - and I realized, I haven't done this in years!

I think that living where I live and working where I work might have led to a certain degree of complacency on my part, whereby Pride has turned into a sort of "beentheredonethat" moment. But I remember when I was sixteen and trying to come out in a rural Wisconsin town without getting killed. My girlfriend and I snuck away to go to Pride in Madison, and it felt like such a subversive, political act. And in too many places, celebrating Pride is still a subversive, political act.

So I'm re-embracing Pride and all of the cultural heritage that goes along with it. Because I am proud of who I am, and proud of my wife, and proud of the state I live in, and I'm even proud of Citizens Bank. And I'm intensely proud of all of the remarkable gay people who paved my easy, easy road and made it possible for me to be complacent about Gay Pride.

[stargazingboi]

Ummmm hmmm I don't wish people a happy pride. So, I didn't vote because that wasn't an option.

It's not that I don't want people to have a wonderful time at pride etc...it just doesn't roll off the tongue or even something I think to even say *shrugs*

[SimpleAlaskanBoy]

If I do, it's something I tend to do on the FB, I'm not "out" as family here unless it's to my medical providers. And even that's iffy, because I don't wear my binder all the time going out. (Sometimes it's more pain than it's worth if it's hot, or it presses on my shunt tubing.)
I really miss living somewhere larger and more progressive. Yes Columbus is not that far away but sometimes it feels like a planet away!

~SAB

[thedivahrrrself]

I call Pride "Gay Christmas", and I gripe to my employer about not having it off work. I tell everyone, gay or straight, "Happy Pride" or "It's Gay Christmas -- be merry and bright".

I live in Oklahoma, so Pride is like the Running of the Queers. All the people from all these tiny towns drive hours and hours just to come be themselves for a weekend.

[Ebon]

It's kind of a shame that we have to even have such a thing as Pride month or parades. The energy is great when I do participate. I don't ever think to say Happy Pride unless someone says it first. That works the same with me for Christmas and other holidays. I'm glad pride month and happy pride are there for the people that need it. I was way into pride when I was younger. I had rainbows everywhere lol. Every once in awhile I will go to the festivities because I'm interested in people, but I don't make it a point to go like I used to.

[Lady Pamela]

[Ciaran]

I've never done a Pride event anywhere despite usually living in cities with fairly large annual Prides and travelling extensively. In fact, I avoid Pride events - for example, when travelling to San Francisco last June, I ensured I booked for a time outside of Pride and, similarly, I do so when travelling to San Diego etc.

I'm based here in London which is this year's venue for World Pride and, although I'm involved in some groups that will be marching on the day, I won't be a part of it.


Although the above may come across as negative or an attempt to knock Pride, it's genuinely not meant to. I appreciate that it's important and affirming to many. It just isn't to me but, for those for whom it is, I wish you all a great 2012 Pride !

[LeftWriteFemme]

I'm not sure why I'm posting this here other than gay men's Pride and culture seems to me to track alongside Butch femme Pride and culture, so here it goes


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/op...e.html?_r=1&hp

[Massive]

I don't think I've ever wished anyone a Happy Pride, but I may start to do so from now on, and see how it goes, it's different over here, the smaller local prides are less to do with politics, etc and more to do with people from all different aspects of the community getting the chance to get together and celebrate who we are, most just want a decent day where they can have some drinks, meet old mates and potentially make new mates too.

[pinkgeek]

This year most of the high holy days of gay (ok all of them) have had to be skipped for me. I am taking a very intense summer chemistry course as well as several gerontology seminars that don't leave me any moments for frivolity or celebration. What I have had instead is many short intense moments for reflection.

We don't live in a world of full equality, but we've come a damn long way from Stonewall and the times before and after. We have medical clinics (not enough) with specialists who have dedicated themselves to queer medicine. We have more art installations, movies, TV characters, artists and writers than ever before. We have queer police officers, fireman, and politicians. We have an army of allies, a generation of young people who refuse to believe the rhetoric of the right and we have a President who changed his mind, admitting it for the world to witness.

So as I return to building organic chemical models and putting together a veritable library of LGBT gerontology information to take back to Hawaii with me I'm grateful.

I'm grateful The.Gay.Beach (aka Delores Park), the TransMarch and the DykeMarch celebratory festivities ie. drinking->drinking->drinking celebrating->celebrating->celebrating will be around when I'm done with school. (For the sake of my sanity I'm going to assume they will be.)

I'm grateful for the older queers who braved the way before me and unflinchingly support my academic endeavors.

I'm grateful for my generation who celebrates these high holy holidays with abandon when I can't.

I'm grateful for the generation coming up behind me - because it just keeps getting better.

!!!!HAPPY PRIDE!!!!

[Turtle]

June has been a busy time in my life - birthdays, anniversaries, Father's Day, school going into the third week of the month, Juneteenth, Pride, and multiple national conferences I would like to go to ---and sometimes do and sometimes don't...for me and how I like to live my life, too many choices...too much.

I take very seriously, one's development of identity, culture, and one's decisions as to how to be in the self and act in in communnity.

And I take even more seriously the "State," the government, and what liberties it grants or withholds.

And I am indebted to those who have been beaten, arrested, imprisoned, killed, unemployed, hated, ostracized, and isolated and stood up to all the things that people do to each other for people not being the way we think they should be.

I have received much in this life for others actions and I am very present with those Blessings. I am glad for Pride AND I don't have such a celebratory attitude because I do not see the Liberty that I believe should exist.

This thread has brought me to thinking about creating a Rainbow Juneteenth family reunion of some sort.....hmmmm.....

Thanks Sherrie

[EnderD_503]

Originally Posted by LeftWriteFemme

I'm not sure why I'm posting this here other than gay men's Pride and culture seems to me to track alongside Butch femme Pride and culture, so here it goes


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/op...e.html?_r=1&hp

why so many people, straight and gay, are so overeager to declare its death. And we will never understand the most essential thing about it: how gay culture continues to perform a sly and profound critique of what passes for normal.

There definitely always does seem to be this need to talk about the supposed "identity-less" queer youth in the same way that many claim gay male culture is "dead." Or the "post-gay" culture of well moneyed, well careered, well privileged young gay men who don't see a need for queer community anymore. I think in those cases, it's once more important to go beyond the most mainstream and media-visible people within the queer population, because those are frequently the ones who are completely out of touch with the struggles of many other queer youths (or many other queer folks for that matter). They think that because they are "successful" (in the mainstream sense of the word) that everyone must be in the same way, that their reality frames all realities, that everyone has the same equality they have. The see equality as the right to get married and be a good capitalist.

As Halperin points out, that isn't the case at all as far as the "death" of gay culture among young gay men (or young queers in general, for that matter).

Instead of worrying that the feminine associations of diva worship, interior decorating or the performing arts may make gay male psychology look diseased, the real question we should ask about gay style is what its refusal of canonical masculinity achieves and what it enables its practitioners, straight or gay, to do.

Again, same can be said for all queer culture, although these days it seems that gay male challenges to standards of masculinity seem more successful (as far as straight-identified society beginning to view certain aspects of "femininity" as "acceptable" for men) than the challenges to the norm by queer women or genderqueer folks. Where in the past, women challenging gender norms were slightly more acceptable than challenges to the standard of masculinity, today that seems to have changed. Probably helped along by the images portrayed by shows like The Real Housewives of XYZ that promotes that idea that women shouldn't try to be independent and self-sufficient in order to be "empowered." In its own way its promoting a hyperfeminine standard of dependence on men as somehow empowering, under the feigned assumption that women have already achieved "equality" and so can go back to "chic" dependency that seems more unbreakable within the mainstream today than it was in the 90s.

So yes, it is important, I think, to look at what queer culture's challenges to masculine/feminine standards enables people to do. And that may be precisely why so many people want to declare certain aspects of queer culture (or queer community, queer politics and queer youth) as "dead," or the culture of young queers as non-challenging, normative and apolitical when there is much evidence pointing to the contrary. These challenges that still continue to exist do enable many to do many things that mainstream straight-identified culture does not. To gain access to freedoms that are restricted elsewhere. They claim that our culture is "dead" simply because it continues to be a threat to normative culture and its oppressive standards.

[alexri]

One of the things I've noticed in the past 10 years is how corporate pride has become.

Ten years ago, we had small tables with flyers in front of the state capitol. We marched, we protested, we knew the issues. We were prepared to call the police if we got jumped by the anti-glbt protesters.

Now, it was pride sponsored by Bud Light, with booths from Subaru, Shaw's grocery stores, Blue Cross Blue Shield, some other large corporations, and six booths selling rainbow everything that was made in China. Instead of walking home with an armful of pamphlets and voter info, I could walk home with a shopping bag full of promotional freebies.

I kid you not-- on my way to pride this year, I passed a chain restaurant by the Providence Place Mall. Their staff was trying to figure out how to hang up a rainbow flag, and were actually asking each other which way the flag was supposed to hang (red on top? horizontal or vertical)? Yes it is nice that they were hanging the pride flag for pride. But it was to attract business.

I still think the events are relevant because there is still so much work to do and I know they do help people connect. I see pride events popping up in new communities all over the nation, especially in the south, and I am grateful for that. Pride is often a time for people who have no connection to the community to come out and get the visual reinforcement that no, you are not alone, and yes, there are a lot more of us that people think. I just wish for a little more "here's a list of all the candidates who are voting against gay marriage" versus "here's a commemorative rainbow (insert product here)."

And don't get me started on the news media that choose to focus on nothing but the more fringe members of the community.