Why I Won't be at Pride this Year

Content warning; this is a personal piece written from the author’s perspective of the issue. The word ‘Q*eer’ will be used in it’s uncensored form throughout the article, as the author identifies with the term and has reclaimed that slur for himself. If readers are uncomfortable with the word it is advised that you refrain from reading the piece.

Point number one: I live in the country (United Kingdom). The nearest city to me is no bigger than a large town, and is only called so because it has a cathedral. I went to Truro Pride once, back in 2012, and while my sugary-cocktail-fueled underage self had a great time, I left the flagging afterparty through a sea of drunk straight people from my college. Particularly striking was the girl sat on her arse in the middle of a soaking wet street, pulling her rainbow-coloured lashes from her eyes while her friend tried to wrangle her to her feet. This was particularly difficult to do at the same time as trying to swig from a half-empty Sambuca bottle.

Now this isn’t to say that I didn’t nor don’t enjoy a good party (not that it was particularly good, I was just seventeen and still enough into Lady Gaga to make the appearance of a tribute act the best night of my life). And being honest, the last few years that I haven’t attended Pride have mainly been to do with the fact that the season always seems to come around when I’m too busy, too poor and too bereft of energy to get on a train for a minimum of an hour and a half to find a decent event.

Now that I COULD potentially make it to at least one Pride event this year, I’m probably not gonna. I have absolutely zero desire to attend. Quite aside from the usual problems, although not as prominent, I’ve spent the last two months scrolling through Facebook and other media having corporations tell me just how excited THEY are for Pride season. And anything that excites a rich bastard sat on millions to billions worth of stolen labour, a great deal of it being the labour of queer people and other minorities, makes me uneasy.

If you’re queer and reading this, I likely don’t need to tell you that the first Pride was a riot. If I do, don’t panic- the loss of your cultural history isn’t really on your shoulders. With the AIDS crisis of the 80’s wiping massive swathes of the queer community from the face of the earth as western governments turned their backs, it isn’t surprising that so many of today’s generation of LGBT+ people have only a loose grasp on how their legal freedoms came about. To cut a long story short, in the summer of 1969 the New York police raided the wrong queer joint and ended up running into more trouble than they were prepared for; one of these troubles came in the form of queer rights activist Marsha P.Johnson, a black trans woman and patron of the Stonewall Inn, where the riot took place. The violence that kicked off that day was the beginning of a revolution in the civil rights of LGBT+ people across America, and soon spread to other areas of the west.

How then, did the queer community congregate in so-called ‘gay joints’ long before it was legal for both the owners and clientele to perform such behaviour? Much like the speakeasies of the prohibition area, queer bars became lucrative business ventures for Mafia families and crime syndicates, as Philip Crawford Jr explains in his book, The Mafia and the Gays. While the romantic idea of outlaws protecting and funding the safety and integrity of queer communities would be nice and all, the reality was very different. Whatever might be said of individuals involved in this movement, overall the underworld’s involvement with the queer community at the time was very much one based on profit, on supply and demand. The community needed safety, and the crime world provided it at a cost, such as flooding those spaces with the flesh trade and exploiting underage queers in the bargain. Does anyone reading this think that the criminal underworld had a particular soft spot for the queer community, some sort of Robin Hood attitude to one of the most reviled groups of people at the time?

If your answer is no, of course not, but the sight of a cardboard box of fries cheaply painted to look like a rainbow raises a smile to your face and a surge of hope in your heart, then I’ve got news for you; the only difference between the criminals that exploited us then and the criminals that exploit us now is which side of the law they’re on. As speculated in my previous article, The Death of the Social Justice Warrior, once the mainstream and the majority are capable of profiting off a social movement, its effectiveness is diminished. This time, the exchange being made is even more in the favour of the ones holding the money. While so much of it is being piled into advertising campaigns declaring how very pro-queer these companies are, we, the community that they are using to flout supposed liberal ideology to gullible consumers whether queer or not, are not seeing a penny of it.

Take Facebook for example, who, as a special present during pride season, gave us a cute new pride flag ‘react’ option that absolutely nobody asked for and had to enter a database to use. Has the community forgotten that no more than three years ago, the multi-billion dollar company donated ten thousand dollars to the reelection campaign of Sean Reyes, an anti-LGBT American politician that then went on to sign in support of Mississippi ‘religious freedom’ law? If you are unaware of this, HB 1523, once passed in 2016, allows for businesses to refuse service to LGBT+ folk on the basis of ‘religious freedom’, in a state that already does not recognize hate crimes against members of the community.

That’s real ‘pro-LGBT’ of you, Zuck. If I didn’t have Google to tell me just how many millions you’ve donated to queer causes over years, then I’d almost think you were- oh wait, never mind. I can’t find a damn thing. That goes for you too, Mcdonalds. While gay men are literally being herded into camps and slaughtered in Chechnya, and now-conservative-run western countries such as the UK threaten to literally ‘tear up’ their human rights acts, we can all sit back and rest easy knowing that true equality around the world has been achieved- thanks to the courageous act of featuring two women sharing a milkshake in one of your advertisements. It’s not like the massive issue of homelessness and mental illness among other things within the community could do with having a couple hundred thousand thrown at it. I’m almost certain that you made more than that in a month of ‘supportive’ straight people piling into your restaurants during pride month for a burger after a long, hard day of being bleeding-heart allies.

Maybe I’m just being a stick-in-the-mud, a bitter old queer before I’ve even hit my thirties, a killjoy socialist set on ruining everyone else’s glitter-caked fun. To be fair, I enjoy a big gay bash as much as the next person. Really, I do. I think Pride is incredibly important as a celebration of a long, ongoing battle; not, in my opinion, to be incorporated into and accepted by straight and cisgender culture, but to dismantle the structures of oppression that placed us as that culture’s doormat in the first place. Unfortunately, rather than being subversive, revolutionary and effective, this year Pride feels coopted in a way that has been slowly growing since the cringe-worthy ‘FCKH8’ era that we’re all guilty of falling for. ‘Pink Capitalism’, with its Auntie Gay advocates and meaningless slogans, might not seem like such a threat now- in fact, many of you might believe it is doing some good. But I would urge the community to remember that before the AIDS crisis of the 80’s, queer rights were beginning to gain as much of a foothold as they were in the 90’s once it had died down. Given half an excuse- such as fear of a deadly disease that was overwhelmingly killing queer, working class people of colour- the mainstream of society was quick to turn on the community, to vilify them and allow them to die in the street.

The fight for liberation is not a timeline of improvement. It has come in waves, in dips and sharp turns, spread out across the globe as queer folk continue to fight against varying levels of threat and oppression. A decade of growth in acceptance and coexistence could easily be followed by one of hardship and increased violence. Should that happen, do you think that these faceless companies will be quite so eager to support us? When the angry minority posting disgruntled comments on these pro-gay ads becomes the attitude of an entire nation, as it has done once and could again, will they be replying with quirky comebacks? Or will they do what’s right for the hoarded millions sitting under their office chairs? I think you know the answer.