Pride and Prejudice

June is gay pride month and I’m always conflicted with how I feel about the manners in which the gay community celebrates their diversities with the rest of the world. I completely understand why we feel it necessary to formally recognize our places in the world, but I don’t understand why we insist on focusing on and exploiting the very things that the majority of the world community recognizes as distasteful and inappropriate. We insist on being accepted as equals by the world community yet we often focus on and advertise our fringe elements the loudest; leather ‘lifestyles’, ‘sex positive’ attitudes and seedy-sexually oriented interests often dominate the gay pride imagery being broadcast out to the masses. The fact is most gay people don’t participate in those sorts of scenarios and most find them in poor taste and as equally out-of-place in the mainstream.

Most gay people I know are hard working, normal men and women who have very mainstream lives. They go to church, volunteer for charity, and contribute to society in real ways. Most believe their sex lives belong in the privacy of their own homes and they do not advertise their specific sexual preferences out in the open. I used to know a pretty famous gay writer/commentator who would always challenge me on these points. He strongly believed that the gay community needed to go way past the line of common decency to prove their points. He believed that by surpassing the boundaries of morality and decency, society would eventually accept a fraction of the gay community’s demands and put us in a much better place than where we started from. I could never agree to that. I don’t understand how exploiting big scary men in assless chaps atop a parade float did anything for the evolution of gay rights. If anything it made people feel further alienated from our community and fuels more discrimination and misunderstanding.

It’s my opinion that the gay community wants to have their cake and eat it too. They bitch and moan about not being accepted by mainstream society yet they refuse to muffle their sexually explosive image. Until I stop seeing male escort ad’s in the back of mainstream gay publications or bare-chested lesbians riding Harley Davidson’s in the gay pride parade I refuse to throw my hat into the ring. Any efforts mainstream gays put forth to help change attitudes and gain legal acceptance will be immediately defeated if the community doesn’t stop fueling the fires of discrimination with their distasteful displays of ‘pride’.

I was glad to see that Elisabeth Edwards was a marshal at San Francisco’s pride parade this past weekend. While I know without a doubt it was a pure political move, she did show up and say some nice things. Another step in the right direction was having several gay veterans of the Iraq War serve as grand marshals. Their inclusion in the parade shows SF has come a long way from having their parade headlined by famous drag queens or popular gay porn stars. I’m hoping this is an indication that the pendulum in finally swinging in the right direction; Away from an emphasis on the line of demarcation between the gay community and the rest of the world and closer to a message of unity and understanding. That’s how movements become mainstream.