Zack's Ramblings: Final Verdict — Pride is a Party, But We Need A War.
Note, on 6/18 I changed this post’s title, replacing the word “anger” with “a war.”
First the good news: This past weekend, Washington DC’s official Gay Pride celebration, was a lot of fun. Many people worked very hard to ensure that every queer group saw some kind of social representation. Both in official niche events like Trans Pride and Latino Pride, but also in a more careful party planning that didn’t just cater to the lowest common queer denominator. The best part of any pride is the city-wide energy that comes from hundreds of thousands of queer people, together, being happy with what they are.
But to me, that’s all that Pride is. It’s energy. It’s the same kind of energy you feel on a college campus after finals when people await their Summer Sendoff parties. It’s the drunk buzz of Georgetown on St. Patrick’s Day, or the Union Station men’s room around Mid-Atlantic Leather. There’s a lot of fun to be had, and lot of people to meet, but it’s not going to change the world.
Gay Pride is a party. It just is. To spend any more time criticizing that fact is to curse the sun for rising. It’s a great party, and a party that brings in people from all over the region to feel safe and out for maybe the only time all year. And that is great. But we need more.
We need anger.
Like it or not, the eyes of the world fall upon us at every gay celebration, and much of the world is straight. Whether or not the heteroes attending pride are supporting allies or spectacle-seeking rubberneckers, it is the one day all year when they are going to see an entire regions queer population in full force. This is how they form their opinion of what we are as a group.
And I honestly can’t be bothered anymore to debate the deleterious effects that speedo queens or dykes on bikes might have on the way we are perceived from the outside. But I do know this: If I was a 55 year old straight married couple who happened to be in town for a conference, and I stumbled upon the gay Pride Parade, and had never before been around a large group of queers, I would think that there was nothing wrong with our lives.
Pride is a party and a party is meant to celebrate. A party doesn’t fight or mourn or hit their heads against the wall because things are so, so wrong. So I shudder to think that the world saw us only as a collection of smiling faces. Smiling at Mayor Fenty. Look how handsome he is! Smiling at a stunningly butch Eleanor Holmes Norton. Smiling at the bar owners and the bank bosses and shockingly dressed boys and girls who draw applause once the politicians have done marching and the real fun begins.
I don’t think the contemporary queer life should be a never ending fight. After all, what’s a life if you can’t actually live it? But I know that Pride has it’s roots in the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and there was nothing joyful about those. Their aftershock, maybe, but I doubt any of the looting drag queens were grinning.
But Zack, you might be asking, don’t we have the right to celebrate how far we’ve come?
We do, I’d respond, but we do that every day. Every time we hit the clubs, every time a blog posts a success story, or a warning about a homo/phobic corporation we shouldn’t be patronizing, we celebrate. The fact that I can hold hands with my boyfriend on the street and not get killed is a celebration. So Pride is like a thousand Saturday nights in one. It’s a tremendous release, but you still gotta wake up on Sunday and do the dishes.
The times that I feel most proud to be gay is when I find myself with a group of people who are also fighting. Fighting to be heard, as in last October’s National Equality Month. Fighting for a productive outlet for our anger, as in the Prop 8 protests of November 2008. Or just fighting the sculpt the world in their own image, like any number of times I’ve had coffee with my gay friends and dreamed about the way things could actually be.
So yeah, I joined the rest of gay DC in drinking my brains out and putting my dick anywhere that would take it. Because Pride is a party, and that’s what you do at a party. But I can’t help wondering how different things would be if every June 300,000 people gathered in the District to show that we were hurt, and pissed, and that we were no longer going to sit back politely and wait for our detractors to decide our fates.
Maybe then I’d have something to smile about. Maybe then we’d have earned a party.
First time here? See what we're all about... Get involved... Send us a tip!...
this piece was so fucking dead on i can’t even take it.
So many good points, I find very little to disagree with you. Gay Prides on many levels appear to be more of a good reason to get drunk in public rather than actually the strides we have made cumulatively as a culture. What I find incredibly disagreeable is that there is more need for sponsors to sell us more merchandise, buy this brand of liquor and drink this kind of beer than to garner support for the ACLU, HRC, DADT and Marriage Equality (which will be brought back into California in the 2012 elections but there is no visibility to start any form or meaningful activism at such a great venue).
And you put it nicely, Where exactly has the activism gone? While some may say by simply holding hand in public, marrying our partners and gaining employment benefits for a our partners allows us to celebrate the fruits of our activism, We can continue to do more.
We’re here, We’re Queer, but the question remains, if everything become “queer”, what will the experience of being and thinking queer in America mean in the future. Therefore, activism, drive and anger are all guiding posts to create our future.
Great job Zack.
Agreed,
I stopped into my post office an hour ago and picked up a tri-fold telling people not to vote for 11 council members and Mayor Fenty because they voted for marriage equality. WTF? In a post office in DC? I’m sick of having my relationship, one that is healthy, strong and full of positive communication, social justice and most importantly love, trashed because it is with another man.
Don’t worry Zack, I’ll bring some anger to the table.
Tom
Where’d you stick your dick this weekend? Word has it it’s zip code worthy BTW.
Did I say “word”? That should have read “experience”.
This marked my 15th consecutive year abstaining from Gay Pride.
I still really don’t feel I’ve missed anything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Shame
I submit to Markdc. In those 15 years of abstaining, have you been doing something constructive or just abstaining? Abstinance or sustinance?
For many, gay pride represents an opportunity to go on picnic with yummy goodies like tapenade and baba ganoush.
Yes, let’s all do like Mark from DC and stay home and “pray the gay away”
Of course I go to Gay Pride. Where else could I wear my new Taylor Lautner jockstrap in public?
I wore a Venetian feather mask to my last gay pride event.
I’d say the point here is to ATTEND gay pride as an activist, not abstain, or wear feather masks or jockstraps and certainly not eating tapanade.
It’s too hot to go to gay pride. I get all sweaty. The street vendors all smell like pee and General Tso Chicken and beer. And it takes at least an hour to stroll through everything. I can’t suck in my stomach for that long anymore.
What is wrong with tapenade?!
BRINI MAXWELL’S TAPENADE
Ingredients
1/2 pound pitted mixed olives
2 anchovy fillets, rinsed
1 small clove garlic, minced
2 tablespoons capers
2 to 3 fresh basil leaves
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Directions
Thoroughly rinse the olives in cool water. Place all ingredients in the bowl of your food processor. Process to combine, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl, until the mixture becomes a coarse paste, approximately 1 to 2 minutes total. Transfer to a gorgeous serving bowl with an elegant pedestal and serve wearing an Indian print kaftan dress.
Oh, stop all your kvetching and go lock yourselves in the bathroom with your Fleshlights!!!!
I LOVE BRINI MAXWELL!!! SHE’S ALL THE GIRL I ASPIRE TO!!!!
15-20 years ago out here in San Francisco there was a fascinating and subtle liguistic distinction between those who referred, variously, sometimes alternatingly, to the Gay Pride “march” or “parade.”
I never hear “march” anymore.
Too many of my white gay male friends have gotten so comfortable that they only kvetch about rent control (they are owners), immigrants (them: “illegal aliens”), or annoying rude minority group behaviors. And these are one-time gay liberation activists. Makes me want to scream (and I moved here to escape stultifying complacency in Portland Oregon).
Somehow when our demands went from “out of the closets and into the streets” to “I want to get married just like you” and “I want to be allowed in the military” things seemed to change.
Until I can be as [ethically] slutty as I want and not fear for my professional reputation, and walk down any Main Street holding hands with a man and be as safe as anyone, I don’t WANT to be normal and accepted [and I don't welcome hair-tossing bachelorettes in my bars, OR their boyfriends.]
I just discovered your work Mr. Rosen, and have bookmarked your ramblings. :) Thanks!
Here we go…this is long…
@ Sarah Palin
Really? Are you saying that “out”, “loud”, “proud”, AVOWED homos who know we can do better than a cordoned off one-day-a-year freakshow carnival masquerading as “Pride” are self-loathing, closeted christianists? I’m agnostic…regarding theology and Official Gay Culture.
Your dismissal of any deeper analysis of “Pride” is:
1) grotesquely reductive
2) really angry, and
3) a projection of amusing proportions
Thank you for proving my point about The Gays and Official Gay Culture. Being an avowed man-who-has-sex-with-men in a world that ONLY sanctions “Gay!” and Official Gay Culture as the ONLY possible “out” identity for homos is like being a Jew in 1939 Berlin – stealthily living outside the penned in precinct assigned to us. It’s THE GAYS themselves who have joined the Nazis. It’s THE GAYS themselves who have joined the Nazis.
You comfortably, reflexively conflate homosexual with “Gay”. Sexual orientation and cultural identity is not the same thing, especially when the cultural identity in question is only five or six decades old and has NEVER BEEN FORMED OUTSIDE OF OPPRESSION. While all “Gays” are homosexual, not all avowed homosexuals culturally identify as “Gay”.
The fantasy of “Gay” identity is dysfunctional: the post-traumatic-stress-disorder of sexual apartheid. “Official Gay Culture” is a massive exercise in behavior modification. Nothing more than a compromised reaction-formation desperately constructed only in the last few decades to mitigate centuries of consistent persecution, disenfranchisement and extermination of same-sex love.
Acknowledge grotesque personal, psychological damage such universal persecution produces in an entire class of people. Understand that celebrating the resultant dysfunctional “cultural identity” is neither deferential nor transformative.
The truth is heterosexuals freely embrace the comforting predictability of homophobic stereotypes mistaking such “acceptance” as “progressive”. Unwittingly becoming stereotypes themselves. Whether all this is unconscious or self-conscious it is misguided.
Another uncomfortable truth: The Gays just accept it, and the lazy stereotypes that are imposed on them, as “progressive”. The genius of perpetuating oppression is getting the marginalized to embrace the categorized identity designed for them. There are plenty of men who were not born with a Gay Accent, Gay Face, loving Lady GaGa and musical theatre that feel completely out of place in contemporary “Official Gay Culture”.
Official Gay Culture today is like Scientology. Those who object or abstain are all too reflexively dismissed by “believers”. Do those Body Thetans make you look saturated in Kool Aid?
Did it ever occur to you that, just maybe, it’s precisely people like you, with attitudes like yours, that Zack was writing about in the first place?
But forgive me for questioning your ACQUIRED “Gay” and/or “Queer” urban-hipster coolness. Forgive me for asking you to think outside your urban-hipster-Gay box (which is a state-of-mind, not an address) and engage some of that “diversity” people like you are always espousing. I was marching with Queer Nation in the streets of Boston and New York when you were (probably?) in diapers. Back in-the-day it was not about a pose…or a party. Where do I report to turn in my Official Gay Card? Do I just give it to you?
You’d think after a while that iPod and poorly made American Apparel t-shirt would begin to feel uncomfortable…like a costume.
But nevermind. I’m going to lock myself in that bathroom and pray because I know that image is so comforting to you.
@MARKDC, In point of fact MarkDC, based on the angry tone of your sophmoronic manifesto, what you just can’t seem to recognize, is that you truly aren’t of the gay tribe. You’re merely “gay acting”. You’re the worst of all worlds, a “closet heterosexual”, a male who periodically goes… gAyWOL(enjoys bottoming and is willing to suck cock in order to “wide receive”) but cannot bring himself to embrace gay life in all it’s many flavors. And, here’s the real cliffhanger, and just why you’re so fucked up, you really can’t stand having the ankles of a man resting on your shoulders. YOU’D PREFER FUCKING VAGINA TO ASS! Just between, you, me and a glory hole… do us all a favor and DATE CHICKS!! FUCK PUSSY!! Then, periodically, have a woman plow you up the ass with a strap-on…as needed…to satiate those pesky ass cravings…DOCTORS ORDERS!
I LOVE TAPENADE!
Zack’s point, which everyone here has missed, is to participate in Gay Pride as an activist, not as a costumed circuit queen or apathetically staying home watching re-runs of Doris Day movies whacking our puds. SHAME ON YOU ALL~
ROFL!! If only the real Sarah Palin were this funny! We’d have nothing to worry about!
Your attitude is typical of an orthodox, old testament gay who feels he practices his homosexuality perfectly and is infallible.
Alienated and lacking in validation, you are unable to wrap your head around the whirling dervish that is modern gay life. So you react, with defensive Mel Gibsonian outbursts, stomping off, building your own church, where as a majority of one, you’re always right. Well, sorry Dimples, but life, like hair, just doesn’t always go the way we’d like.
Stop being the fag version of Miss Haversham, embittered in a rotting ball gown, waiting for a party that has long since passed. Open up those shutters, shake off those cobwebs, while there’s still time!
There are dudes out there that just like physical manplay. They don’t necessarily have to be gay or to have had sex with men to engage in it. It’s a whole masochist/submissive male domination role play thing. It surely falls under the classification of “fetish”, but not necessarily gay, usually involving singlets, jockstraps and seedy motel rooms.
I’d say most of them got into this early on exploring within the confines of acceptable societal behavior of the day. Some graduated on to sex with men and indentifying as homosexual and others did not.
You guy’s are real pieces of work here, I’m a writer and have been given some great character studies to draw from. THANK YOU!
The argument here is that there is no argument. People WANT assimilation, money and comfort. Not activism, revolution and anarchy. The gay community is no different.
I am so sick of being dicatated to by you radical malcontents “MARK of DC”. You just can’t stand the fact that there are guy’s out there who like their lives just the way they are no matter how trivial or insignificant they may seem to you. They are happy. It just kills you that they can’t comform to your standard of gay manhood.
If you haven’t already read this, I suggest you do now and then again and again and again…the last 1/4 of the piece sums you up to at “T”….http://www.independentgayforum.org/news/show/27125.html
Nothing more offensive than an apathetic agnostic metaphorically using gays and Nazis to prove his point. The thesis committee has decided not to grant you your degree. Please leave our offices.
From the Urban Dictionary:
Fagnostic, fag – meaning gay and agnostic – meaning indifferent. A person who is fagnostic isn’t really gay, but isn’t really opposed to the idea either. Fagnostics can be confused closet cases or ‘three beer queers.’
Also, refer to ‘hipster.’
Gay dialect, homo face and such concepts are nothing new and certainly pre-date anyone arguing on this board.
Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Monty Clift, Noel Coward….Wanna go even further back? Oscar Wilde, King Ludwig of Bavaria, Caligula. Where did they “acquire” it? As there was no template to work from. No cultural club to identify with. It developed spontaneously out of a purely hybrid, highly creative and uniquely stylized lifestyle. They were just born with it.
Swish and effeminacy are part of the gay gene and those who do not act “camp” are more likely supressing the natural desire to do so. And camp does not have to be defined as dancing around in a slip singing “I Feel Pretty”
If there’s any faking going on, it’s in the hyper-masculine acting side of the gay persona(see bigmuscle.com). Now that’s good theatre.
For the record, I was the one who suggested locking the bathroom, but I did NOT say praying, I said using a Fleshlight and that applies to all you Debbie Downers!
Furthermore, it’s posts like these that are PRECISELY why I have come to the point where being gay has become so tedious that I am considering converting to heterosexualism.
A little light reading for all you vicious queeens.
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Faggotry
@ Sarah Palin
You clearly don’t get it or are just plain dumb.
“Gay” is NOT a sexual orientation.
Pretending sexual attraction can be confined to a single cultural identity is reductive AND perpetuates the very oppression you seek to dismantle.
Good luck.
NO MARKDC, Gay IS as much about sexual orientation as political, socioeconomic, intellectual and so on and so forth!
Homosexuals of your ilk, who claim to be less homosexual(WTF!) than homosexuals who call themselves “GAY”(oh gasp!!!) are attempting to deconstruct homosexuality by making homosexual behavior less taboo and more tolerated to those who practice CHRISTIAN beliefs. Sanitized, “CostCo friendly” homosexuality playing at a suburban multiplex cinema near you. PATHETIC!
Where do you live Ashburn Farms? Centreville? And oh, let me guess, you’re out, but only when social discretion dictates it as not being awkward for you. And you drive a SUV or a hybrid vehicle so that you pleasantly avoid throwing off any gay vibes when you shop at Wegman’s. After all, we wouldn’t want to make any of the Kate Gosselin clone, minivan driving housewives “uncomfortable”?
The true gay community embraces EVERY gender-bending act, fetish, affectation and includes those things in the general specter of the image that “gay” projects publicly or otherwise.
You reject these associations completely and consider them a form of prejudice against men who love men.
HETEROFLEXIBLE IS NOT HOMOSEXUALITY, it’s just two men choosing to hump each other rather than finding a woman or abstaining from fornication.
That’s not gay.
I’d make book that your track record, if you’ve ever been in a relationship, is 3-6 months. You can’t handle what’s required as a true gay man committed to another gay man because deep down inside it revolts you.
I reiterate, buy yourself a Pulte townhome in Sterling Park and DATE CHICKS!
@markdc, I’m SURE you’ll be interested in attending!
http://www.observer.com/2010/politics/homocon-coming-new-york-bringing-ann-coulter
@MARKKDC,
Oh dear Mark, you are so right to be staying home from Gay Pride!
Because as gays and lesbians we mutated from a defective gene pool, are biological errors and social deviants. Staying home, behind locked doors with curtains drawn really is the best bet.
Thanks a bunch
@MARKDC!!!!
You actually managed it here, to come off sounding as angry and rapacious as Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman when he compared himself to Poland!!!!
GOD YOU’RE A JERK!!!
For fucking God’s sake, comparing Hitler, NAZI’s, Jews and gays all in the same sentence, because people want to go Gay Pride? Is REALLY fucked up!
If we’ve joined the NAZI’s, then that must make you captain of this schadenfreude faggot Hitler youth pageant you’ve poisonously confected.
What a faggotty piss assed cry-baby you are.
Do you ever look at your angry face in the mirror and give y’self the creeps?
And double up on those weekly therapy sessions!!!!!!!!!
This article is so gay. Oh shit, did I just offend all the ‘gays’ out there with my oh so outrageously scurrilous term for homosexuals?
But I couldn’t have surely. I, like you lot, have just usurped the word that used to mean happy, to another new meaning, as in lame.
Loved the discourse between Sarah Palin, great moniker by the way, so original, and MarkDC. Sarah, in Australian parlance, you are a wanker.
My uncle’s a fag, an out and proud fag, and he is now 68, an old queer, who hates the term gay to describe his sexual orientation. He hates it because it was a word taken from our language, to mean homosexual, because so many homosexuals, who tell the world that they are so out and proud gay, really aren’t, because they take offence so easily when someone uses the words queer or fag.
If you were so out and proud, why not just ignore those, like me, who use the word, without chuck a fucking hissy fit and getting your little dicks and gaping vaginas in a tizzy.
Accept that there are many out there who do not like your lifestyle, of reaming male arses with rampant cocks, or girls licking labias. I personally don’t give a rabid rat’s arse what people do in their own homes, behind closed doors. But why do you lot have to shove it in our faces, telling us that we are a bunch of bigoted racist redneck fag hating homophobes, just because many don’t like the lifestyle?
It’s hypocritical to the max, you lot of ‘gays’, calling those people intolerant, when it’s you lot who are the most intolerant.
Like our lifestyle you homophobic cunt or I’ll call you a homophobe. No wonder people call fags a bunch of mincing queens, limp wrist flapping poo punchers.
Get fucking over it. Accept that not all people like your lifestyle. That would be akin to me, a cunthound, who loves slurping the pink, and brown, of a woman, calling you a bunch of cunthead intolerant poohounds because you called me a breeder. What a truly pathetic response to what you are called.
I am a breeder, but I don’t tell the whole fucking world that I stick my cock inside cunt, I just get on with life, unlike you fucking lot who just have to ram it down our fucking throats.
MarkDC, you da bomb, whatever the fuck that means. No, I know what it means, but it’s just stupid juvenile speak and I don’t use it, except for now. SP, you’re just some whiny dyke who has no right to use that moniker. Fucking pretentious wanker.
And I lived with my fag uncle and his boyfriend(s) back in the 70s in Sydney, just down from fag heaven, Oxford St, visited a lot of the clubs, found fags to be great blokes, no different from us straights, maybe a little bit more bitchy, but hey, if one is the catcher then he has the job of the woman, so bitchiness is a must.
So come on Sarah, give me your best shot. I won’t respond because you’re a pretentious wanker, a real out and proud gay woman. I guess you are now writing a hate letter to OBambiBamalamadingdong, calling him a homophobe because of his stance on the ‘gays’ in the military. You go girl, and while you’re at it, go and shave those pits and your crack and arse hair, and your legs, and shave off that ‘tache, and put on a dress instead of your combat gear with big heavy boots.
And go and make out in the streets of San Francisco, when they cordon off the streets come gay pride time, and join the men and women copulating in plain view of families with children, big cocks entering arses and mouths enveloping cocks, while you hairy girls in fatigues are getting out the lawnmowers to find the pink bits.
Rant fucking over. Just get the fuck over yourselves, you poor little preciouses.
wow.this form went to shit. i thnk people are missing the point here. i am gay im 19 and live in kentucky.yes people who dont know me hate me just because i am gay and yes theres not a damn thing i can do. pride is the last thing i feel when i go to a “pride” parade. i feel embarassed i feel shame i feel guilt. its a hypocrisy.respect is like trust its not given freely.i was talking to a woman at a coffee shop she was wearing a deep v t shirt and way too damn short shorts and was mad because men were stareing.
this is what happens when gay culture meets the real world. as far as can see i am second class.one of the most hated kinds of people in the modern world blacks are free,women vote and i cant hold hands with who i love.this is not the 60s we are out and proud and still getting raped by mainstream sociaty.if this next statement offends thats too damn bad.i do not wear polo,american eagle or ambercrombie and fitch.i do not throw fabulous partys.i dont say fabulous.i do not have a gay lisp. i identify as gay,the last time someone used the term faggot to describe me i broke 2 knuckles beating him. i dont want people to be forced to look at me or fight next to me in the army.all i want is some respect for beng a respectable person. to the older crowd,know that the genrations to come will have no one to guide them if you are too cought up in living pc to extend a helping hand. so go have fun in the club,make us all look bad and degrade yourself while acting “proud”.me? i dont give a fat fuck.club drugs,skinny jeans and trying to pretend that things are ok? not on my to-do list.
Leave your response!
Recent Coments
Most Commented
Most Viewed - 30 Days