| Every year in the early summer, somewhere in the gay press the query appears, timidly, almost apologetically: Why is it we continue the Pride rituals? What does it all mean? It’s the 21st century and we live in a free democracy, after all. What exactly does it accomplish to shake our tailfeathers down America’s main streets, anyway? What do we want it to accomplish? Of course Pride season raises a lot of money and awareness for LBGT businesses and help organizations, and offers opportunities for socializing and partying on a grand scale. But the best reason to keep having Pride parades and picnics and Gay Days is simply that it is our homocivic duty to keep the fundamentalists outraged. If not for the LBGT thorn in their sides, the fundies would have such a long drought between the godless debauchery of St. Patrick’s Day and the slippery slope to hell that is Halloween. What to do with all that time not imposing your morals on others? Well, there’s always the Burning Man Festival, but who wants to drive hundreds of miles into the desert heat to harass people who haven’t bathed in days? Pride festivals are so much more convenient. There’s one in most burgs of any size. You can load the kids and the picket signs into the minivan, cruise down to the local park, teach your children the family value of chanting idiotic epithets at people about whom you know absolutely nothing, and be home in time for the evening rerun of The 700 Club. You know what really steams the Right Wingnuts about Pride? More than the outrageous drag, nudity, and drunken revelry (which could just as easily be any oh-so-straight Spring Break), what really chaps their cheeks is that we actually call it “Pride”. That, beyond the bacchanalian excesses, despite two thousand years of religious persecution, despite violence and legal injustice and cruelties both overt and subtle, the underlying theme of the Ten Percent’s June events is pride. LGBT America has the chrome cojones to celebrate itself with the word Pride. The nerve of us. Language really does have that much power, and our pride is what the fundies find intolerable— maybe, in some cases, even more so than the L or B or G or T part of the equation. And though the rainbow tribe ranges all over the spectrum of sexual preferences, political ideology and social habits, LBGT Pride, sisters and brothers, is the thing we come together to share with each other and see in each other.. We have Pride because we’re making a go of it in a world that’s not making it easy on us. We have Pride because we’ve had to look deep inside ourselves at our darkest shadows to figure out who in the hell we are. We have Pride because we have to explain it to others—over and over again, for the rest of our lives, and we do it and survive it. We have Pride because we’re told by ignorant, unkind people all the time that we’re not as good as they are, and we bloody well know better. We also need Pride because it reminds us of our history, which is not taught in schools but is nonetheless a part of our truth. We need it because less than six hundred years ago, women were tortured and killed for being witches, and you can bet a lot of those women were the uppity unmarried nonconformists who would include a bunch of lesbians. We need it because when those women were burned at the stake, the townsfolk sometimes snatched up local men suspected of being homosexual and tossed them onto the pyres. A “faggot”, by definition, is a bundle of bound sticks with which to light a fire. We need Pride because less than a hundred years ago, we might have been committed to involuntary incarceration for simply voicing the truth. And we have it because less than fifty years ago, some queen in a New York dive had enough of police harassment and threw a size-18 pump at some cop’s head, starting the Stonewall riots and igniting the gay liberation movement. We need Pride because less than 12 years ago a gay boy in Wyoming was killed for his courage and the Right Wingnuts came out to his funeral to yell to his grieving parents that God hates fags; and we have it because a bunch of his family’s friends, wearing huge feathered angel wings, formed a line to protect the family from the sight of these raving lunatics. We need Pride because less than one year ago, some nutcase walked into a gay bar in Massachusetts and attacked the patrons with a hatchet before opening fire with a Luger, injuring two. And we have Pride because the bar’s still open. We have Pride because today LBGT high school kids are raising hell to bring their dates to prom and to form student groups that promote tolerance through understanding. And we need it because their principals and school boards are often unsupportive and sometimes outright hostile. We have and need Pride because it is the Independence Day of the LGBT community, and we earn it every day. ### |