The Shame of Pride
Childish, corporate, and aimless; Pride has lost its way. To find its purpose, it has to return to its roots.
Last year marked the golden anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and its descendant, Pride, peaked in attention and attendance. 1,500,000 people marched in London. 2,500,000 in New York, including its governor. And every notable publication dedicated reams to its coverage. But 2020 is the year the world stood still; an alien pandemic putting everything that defines modern life on pause. This June has been the first since Stonewall that Pride has gone unmarked, or at least un-marched; every institution this side of the Catholic Church still changed their logo to the customary rainbow. For many, this caesura from the moving world’s distractions has afforded an opportunity for self-reflection and improvement. To get fit, start a new diet, or pursue the goals and hobbies you never afforded yourself the time for. No longer focused on putting one foot afront the other, you can evaluate whether you should be heading down this path. To look back at where you strayed from course, what thoughts and habits took you there, and the destination you actually want to reach. Pride is long overdue such serious self-reflection. It has lost all meaning, forgotten its roots, and, unless it forms a plan of where to go next, will die in the desert it has found itself in. And if it doesn’t change, it would deserve to.
The founding ideas of the West arose during the Enlightenment, but its social norms and institutions trace back to the Judeo-Christian world. Nations were made of communities whose founding unit was the family; and these families were formed and secured through marriage, bound to their god. But unable to have children, barred from marriage, and rejected by the church, gay people were incompatible with this vision. These outcasts were forced to conform or flee; and sought meaning in the unlicensed corners the straight world rejected. But unbound by the Hayes Code of heterosexual life, the gay world exploded with vitality; a loosened gasket of kink, creativity, and camp. It was a cultural underground charged by the third rail; of leather straps and fishnet tights, tumescent cartoons and beefcake magazines, hookups in darkened parks and empty beaches, and inconspicuous bars whose bathrooms thumped with loud club music and strangers in sexual abandon. It was an alternative world; running parallel to the normal one but hidden from sight.
Upon its shores, Oscar Wilde sat imagining his vain Adonis, Warhol took pornographic stills, and Hockney painted lost lovers. Prince, Little Richards, Elton John, and Freddie Mercury strode its stage. Its wordsmiths had names like Ginsberg, Ruskin, Ellis, Hemingway, Baldwin, Palahniuk, Whitman, Capote, and Vidal, and they were dressed by Lagerfeld, Ford, and Versace. Cinemas in the alternative world played Pink Narcissus and Myra Breckinridge and Rocky Horror Picture Show. Its manifesto was Divine’s:
“Kill everyone now! Condone first-degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit! Filth are my politics! Filth is my life!”
Pushed from the orbit of Jerusalem, their world circled Athens instead, operating under its own different rules and norms. For the straight world, sexual deviance is what the name says; a dangerous violation of the long-term monogamy that undergirds its communities, institutions, and communal purpose. Conversely, gay hedonism was not shallow lust or unpragmatic distraction but bacchanalia in its original form; higher purpose found in sex, food, and drugs, and sincerity crafted from the obscene. The precise origin of homosexual licentiousness is uncertain; perhaps arising from sexual and masculine insecurity (per the titular Faggots of the late Larry Kramer) or maybe inherent to gay sex (per Daniel Mendelson in The Elusive Embrace). Regardless of the source, this different world had a distinct sexual rulebook, and whilst the distance between gay and straight sexual norms has lessened, this still is true to this day.
The quaint contradiction of heterosexuality is that the deep difference that attracts the two sexes to each other leave them anxiously blind to each others thoughts and desires. Courtship is how to navigate this erotic fog, using rituals to assess a potential mate; of who pays the bill, how long to wait before messaging, and on which date it’s acceptable to have sex. Paranoid minute-by-minute affirmation of consent is its latest, most ill-conceived form. But gay men see without these sexual cataracts. As Mendelsohn notes, they intimately understand how their partner’s sexual experience feels in a manner unobtainable for a straight person:
“Sex between men dissolves otherness into sameness… It is gay men who, during sex, fall through their partners back into themselves, over and over again.”
As such, gay sexual proposition is not dependent on such games, but defined by clarity and sexual directness, as seen in ‘the fine art of cruising’ (as critic Armond White phrased it), and modern dating apps. Compare Tinder with Grindr. The former is a spin-the-wheel lottery that gives women the illusion of unlimited choice and men the illusion of endless possibility. The latter, a grid of faces arranged by distance and immediate availability, with a constantly utilized ability to send lude photographs to prospective mates. Gay sexual directness has also created many kinks that are now enjoyed by all but that would be too risky to experiment with in heterosexual congress.
As such, for centuries prior Woodstock, gay men alpha- and beta tested the sexual revolution.
For the last hundreds of words, I have outlined and praised what may be summarized as ‘gay culture’; in the narrow sense of the word (art, photography, literature etc.) and the broad (attitude, lifestyle, philosophy). But there is a necessary distinction to be drawn between this gay culture — the alternative world — and gay people as individuals.
Yes, this culture was made by and of gay people, but as an individual, there is nothing about being gay that ties you to it. Same-sex attraction is not bound to any beliefs or obligations. It is not a lifestyle choice (as the rights movement long fought to assert), so your lifestyle choices can’t make you less gay. It testifies to the success of the gay rights movement that those who wish to live that traditional married religious life are now able to do so. That isn’t — to quote an unpleasantly widespread attack on Pete Buttigieg — “Heterosexuality without Women”.
Nor does gay sex have a political stance. Peter Thiel is not “an example of a man who has sex with other men, but not a gay man” because he supports President Trump. If you are gay, voting for right-wing parties or believing in traditionalism doesn’t make you less so. Nothing does. Sodomy doesn’t have a tax position.
Boiled down, this is to say something close to a tautology; that a gay person differs from their straight equivalent in no relevant way bar their attraction. Gay sexuality is intellectually fascinating but so too is all sexual attraction and being gay is neither special nor inherently celebratory¹. Gay culture, on the other hand, is. This distinction is key to appreciating the best of gay cultural contribution and the worst of what it has transmogrified into.
In the 1990s the mainstream perception of gay people changed; but the post Will and Grace and Ellen shift was not what it seemed. Neither program pushed acceptance forward but were the result of it. Instead, they marked a change in perception and conversation; from being about ‘gay culture’ to ‘gay media’ — where the value of content is assessed primarily on it’s gay presence as a form of minority representation, no distinct from any other diversity quota filling. Aesthetic and philosophical quality be damned; the most mindless and artless entertainment would be readily praised and promoted, with the critical standard being how “important” it is.
Some gay art still holds onto its original purpose; namely Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s romance, Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo. But that is ignored in gay media, in favour of the placating and beige. Love, Simon was widely celebrated precisely because of its blandness. Noting that its gay presence was the sole element that made it “important” and “subverting of conventions” almost acknowledges how uninspired and generic it is. Frank Ocean’s foreword to the printed script of Moonlight is more aesthetically significant than the film was; a meticulous but mediocre sexless romance, deified for its intersectional compliance.
Whilst this aligns with intersectional ideology, it also emerges from a discomfort with the complex, rough, dirty, and often unlikeable people who are at gay culture’s forefront. The “transgendering of Stonewall” (as James Kirchick detailed for Tablet) is diversity agitprop², but it also positions Stonewall as a generic minority fight against ‘patriarchy’ and ‘white supremacy’, whose figures are clean and nice and aspirational. The truth is grimier. Sylvia Rivera couldn’t have hurled the mythical brick or shot glass because she was asleep in Bryant Park, passed out on heroin. And Jackie Hormona, who likely threw the first punch, was not an activist or revolutionary, but a member one of the bars primary clientele; young, white, often homeless gay men looking to score in every sense of the word. This ideological Kleenex scrubs out the messiness of gay hedonism, sanitizing it to makes its history look upper middle class, advertiser-friendly, and above all else, hyper-positive.
The bubbly hosts on Queer Eye encapsulate this ‘gay media’ aesthetic; as do Mitch and Cam from Modern Family and virtually all prominent gay people in popular media, be they fictional or not. They are the “Sweet and Sexually Unthreatening and Super-Successful Gays”, as Bret Easton Ellis wrote in his piece on ‘the Reign of the Gay Magical Elves’ for Out. But there’s a great oddity to this.
Gay men have conquered the world, cracked Enigma, and held the White House³. Even in one man, our species suffered a phenomenal opportunity cost by Alan Turing being unable to live out a full life⁴; and that he was prevented from doing so speaks to the strength and scale of homophobic exclusion. But in turn, it also demonstrates how extraordinary and inspiring gay culture is. That in the face of extreme persecution, brilliant creatives didn’t cower but found strength in their ostracism, using it to see the world from first principles, being free from social pressures, and a making culture of radical vibrancy, dynamist, and global influence rarely seen since the Ancient world. And everyone has benefitted from this. After all, the West has always been strongest when the ideas of Jerusalem and Athens met.
With the AIDS crisis, that cultural magnetism turned into impassioned rage and refusal to die quietly and conveniently ignored. There were marches, chained together sit-ins, and sacrilegious public disruptions to get the world’s attention; of the old god at the St Patrick’s Cathedral Mass and the new, at the New York Stock Exchange. On their T-shirts, printed in bold white font, was “SILENCE=DEATH”, and at all these protests, they shouted out who they were, even whilst desperate and dying.
‘Gay media’ is docile and obsequious. Gay culture was definitively non-compliant and disagreeable, and thus so too were its brightest minds and voices. Larry Kramer was hateable, and better for it; as was Dali. Returning to its Athenian origins, being gay was not a gentle bubbly girlish affair but of men affirming their masculinity by having sex with weaker, younger men. So too it was for their gods, like Zeus. In Symposium, Plato even advocates for an army consisting wholly of gay lovers, which Thebes actualized in the 500 man strong ‘Sacred Band of Thebes’. In all that is best in gay culture and history, there is power and “fuck off” mentality for shallow friendliness, not ingratiation.
Yet today, the people on Netflix’s Queer Eye who get makeovers are referred to as ‘heroes’.
‘Pride’ is defined by this frivolity. As an institution, it is an ill-conceived attempt by gay media to integrate gay culture and the history of civil rights activism into its bright, family-friendly vision of the world. It was doomed to failure. The result is more akin to the Instagram-adored Starbucks Pink Flamingo Frappuccino than John Waters. It’s devoid of purpose. Too sexual for a parade, too childish to be serious, too corporate to be moral, and too petty to matter; a glitterized, otiose, pink-confetti strewn, radiant, rainbow-bannered, family-filled festival of nothing, sponsored by a soda company and McDonald’s. When Pride does break from puerility, it’s repulsive; like the perversion of the sexually repressed. Beyond the immediate distaste, lightly clad men gyrating before children only affirms the worst homophobic paranoias.
Using a parade to celebrate and spread gay culture was as improper as a porn parade would be, for the nature of the medium runs contrary to broad public consumption. It’s not incidental that Pride’s only remaining element of gay cultural spirit is in private; namely young men with Grindr and a hotel room, visiting the parades of different cities, who fly in, get their fly down, and fly out the next day.
The aesthetic failure of Pride also dooms its limited attempts to carry forth the spirit of gay rights activism. As Douglas Murray notes in The Madness of Crowds: “If the black civil rights movement had included a fetish section it would have been considerably easier to ignore its moral force.” Even violent protest is pragmatic compared with sexually repulsing most of the population (gay and straight alike).
SILENCE=DEATH has proved painfully resilient to the passing of time, once again returning to the vernacular following the killing of George Floyd. Yet the community that birthed the aphorism repeats it without seeing their complicity. There’s a Latin precursor to it; expressio unius est exclusio alterius, or ‘the expression of the one is the exclusion of the other’. Nothing more perfectly describes the ethical imbalance of outraged social media; particularly gay twitter.
Life for gay people in the West was a painful, often deadly, struggle for centuries. To attempt to recount all the West’s examples of legal and cultural persecution of gay people would be endless exercise in misery, from nationwide bans of sodomy, Lavender Scare fervor about treason, vile psychiatrist interventions, and then an intentionally-ignored lethal plague. But due to the hard-won victories of gay rights activists, this has changed, and rapidly. As Andrew Sullivan noted last year: “There has never been a better time or place in the history of the world to be gay than in 2019 and in the West.” And that arc of progress has only continued, with job discrimination on sexuality recently made illegal across the United States (even if under questionable jurisprudence).
But rather than devoting attention to those poor souls under the yoke of brutal, homophobic regimes, gay media and outrage twitter have focused even more sharply on the West, condemning it even more strongly and, counterintuitively, becoming even more fervent and enraged about the slightest of matters. Freud called this “the narcissism of small differences”, and beyond being pointless, it’s an immoral waste of attention.
Last year, five men were beheaded by Saudi Arabia for the crime of being gay. In recent years, executions of gay men (and teenagers) have occurred in Yemen, Somalia, and Iran. The last country is uniquely vile as it does so whilst sponsoring gender conversion surgery, and as of 2008, carried the ominous silver medal for performing such surgeries. The result being that in Iran, gay men must choose between the knife or the noose. Or as HuffPo propagandized; “Iran’s Sex-Change Operations Provided Nearly Free-Of-Cost”. And none of this mentions ISIS, whose members hang gay people from cranes and throw them from rooftops, along with the many countries where homosexuality doesn’t receive capital punishment, but still flails, imprisons, and fines for the ‘crime’.
But gay twitter can barely muster a limp word for them.
It’s too busy throwing a hissy fit because Jeff Goldblum asked a contestant on Drag Race about the relationship between their sexuality and their religion, Islam. Or ranting about Charlotte Pence’s book, Christian bakers, Olympic membership, bathroom bills, and Kevin Spacey’s cumbersome apology.
In 2013, as the Iranian foreign secretary was to deliver a speech to the German Council of Foreign Relations, protesters staged a mock hanging outside, in protest of their treatment of gay people. Pride needs this moral potency but will never have such demonstrations. Hangings don’t sell cola.
That famous aphorism — SILENCE=DEATH — was the slogan for ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), founded by Larry Kramer, who died recently of pneumonia, aged 84. Kramer was an activist, playwright, and righteous rabble-rouser who fought his way to the microphone and shouted into it, changing the world and saving lives in the process. Opening his antediluvian plea, 1,112 and Counting, he wrote:
“If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble. If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get”.
To this day, governments are brutally executing gay people. Yet Pride gives its microphone to a voice no more powerful than Ariana Grande’s.
We should be furious.
Footnotes:
¹ The pointless Straight Pride movement that captured headlines a few years ago was a corollary to this false belief (which is promoted by much of modern Pride).
² And due how uncouth it is to utter any of the historical facts, damn successful too
³ For those unaware or unconvinced, I would recommend C.A. Tripp’s opus, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln
⁴ As Ian McEwan depicted in Machines Like Me
