As Thomas Paine once wrote,
“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: ‘Tis dearness only that gives everything its value.”
Pride Month, June, once known as Gay Pride Month, but which now bears the present moniker because of all the letters being added over the years, is a thing of pride in itself. It was not bestowed upon the GLBTADDMORELETTERS Community as a top down gift resulting from some enlightened intuition that motivated the majority to start seeing us as people with equal rights.
It was something fought for and established by those to whom it applied and defended by the same.
The first Pride Parade was held a year after the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 and was more of a political statement than a party. Pride parade and festival acceptance in many places has not been an automatic event, but parade and festival permits often had to be fought for, and even when granted faced opposition in the media, the churches, the gatherings of the “illuminati” at their weekly gatherings in Bowling alleys, neighborhood bars, the halls of fraternal orders of various things, and in public protests.
The first level of opposition to parades was to promote the totally false idea that they would be nothing but a celebration of lewdness, complete with nudity and public sexual acts. Things no self-respecting society would want paraded in its streets. Media coverage centered its attention on anything that might give them that hoped for moment so they would have eye-popping coverage on the evening news and pictures to print in the next day’s newspaper, while ignoring anything that showed the parade and festival was about so much more, mostly so much normal.
As progressive as California was in the 1980s and in spite of the progress in Gay rights, there was still much work to be done and, as I could see when living in Long Beach, California, an exaggerated opposition from the far right conservatives and evangelicals.
In my time there, when the Pride Parade had become more of a celebration than a political rally because of what progress in equality had been made, and the local newspaper defended it because the only other parade in the city was when the circus elephants walked from the train station to the arena, we still had “Bible Bill” who came each year with a group of people yelling Bible verses at us while praying for us to give up sin with occasional references to AIDS because, after all, this was the 80s and the early years of AIDS. One year Bible Bill decided to add more concrete meaning to “Bible Thumper”, and had his people charge into the parade unit which was passing just in front of Bible Bill and his people at the time, and along with shouting Bible verses, some also added hitting people with their Baptist Roots required soft leather bound Bibles.
It was the only act of violence in the History of the parade and resulted in having Bill and his flock stay within a yellow tape designated area where they could yell to their hearts content at subsequent parades.
When the first Pride Parade was held in Orange County in Southern California, an extremely right wing and evangi-fascist county, because of threats, for the safety of participants and spectators it was held on a controllable and easy to supervise university campus. This may have averted the threats of physical harm if the parade was held, but it did not eliminate the presence of those who would have carried them out if there hadn’t been a police presence, from standing on the obvious and noticeably raised places behind the parade spectators and marchers.
I saw them when I marched in that parade. It was a bit threatening. A silent, looming line of people along the near horizon, simply watching.
When, before my time there, Oklahoma City held its first Pride Parade, the KKK made good on its threat to do so, and showed up at the major intersection in the Gay District. They assumed there would only be a few people there, and, so, they could do some beating. The crowd, however, was so large, they quietly went away.
In my time there, we had people along the parade route that marchers had to be aware of, and, often, the Westboro Baptist Church protested us with signs held by children bearing silhouettes of people in various sex positions that were more lewd than anything in the parade.
When banners that were hung on light poles along the major parade route were removed by order of the mayor who did not want to offend the Baptist preachers coming to town for a convention in spite of appropriate permits having been sought and granted, the Gay Community had to fight in court to have them replaced.
For non-Gay people Pride is not our being proud of our being of a particular sexual orientation, but more our Pride in the successes and those who got them done in our quest for full equality. We have nothing to be ashamed of, and the opposite of shame is pride.
However, there are the annual stories of teachers who, as is done in other months set aside to celebrate the groups to which students belong, like Black, Asian, or Hispanic, and all those days throughout the years that the same are celebrated, want to acknowledge Pride Month , but are given some reason to not be proud enough to let all the students know why the month is about Pride, especially the Gay students in the school who need a boost. These teachers are often disciplined, and the teacher becomes part of the legal battle to get equal inclusivity.
Pride Month did not just begin. It was won in many places and still fought for in others.
I am probably going to burn a few bridges, but we are at a point where conditions are right to assess Post struggle Gay Privilege (PSGP).
There is a definite division between the before and the after, and there are, besides those who lived before and those born after, those who lived from the before into the after and know what it took to create that temporal dividing line.
There was a time Gay people were simply treated like crap, and a time after when this is happening less and less, if at all.
To avoid repeating how change came about after the way things had been for any Gay person With the use of certain improved drugs, you can enjoy the sexual activity along with buy levitra in canada the assistance of the blue pill. Injections – These can be done any time before a sexual encounter. super viagra generic Now you have Kamagra, it’s a cost effective anti-impotency medicine should order cialis in the usa from online medical stores are not only ideal to grab these miraculous pills, soft tablets or jellies for the same then all you have to do is place your order online. You need to add onions, garlic, bananas and spices in your sildenafil samples diet to achieve better blood flow. regardless which eventually added letter in the ever growing GLBT+ applies, let me just summarize:
If you were born during or any year close to 1989, you are the beneficiaries of the hard work, and what came from tragic losses, wrongful arrests, physical neglect, and second class citizenship of those people in places like Massachusetts who got the equality bills enacted that granted equal rights to Gay citizens.
So you have always had what you did not fight to get.
By the time you were in school, regardless whether you were your true self at an early age, or still in the dark, and whether or not you were a victim of bullying or an observer, laws were passed to limit bullying in the hope of ending bullying in schools and the Gay students were included. Schools were required to have remedies for bullying, and teachers were required to have sensitivity training about sexual orientation and gender identity just as they had been having for race, color, creed, nationality, and disability.
By the time you arrived at the age when all your straight friends were getting married and you loved someone enough to wish you could marry too, Massachusetts got marriage equality, so you could.
You celebrate the raising of the Pride flag in public spaces, the involvement of politicians recognizing pride Month and joining in, and celebrate with fireworks, street dances, concerts, art shows, a week’s worth of activities open to the whole community, and parades.
The present attitude seems to be that Pride Festivals and Parades are part of the fabric in many cities. The tourist bureau of the reddest state in the Union includes its capitol city’s Pride Parade and Festival in its annual tourist guide. It was not always so. None of this would be possible if the people we do not know, have never seen, will never meet, and who may or may not be still among us, hadn’t gambled with their lives, their careers, their families, their social standing, and their reputations to make the changes that give us Pride.
We have Pride Month because there was a battle won in each pace that has had them.
What strikes me as ironic, is that while even members of the GLBT Community are wrapping their heads around some rather new concepts of sexuality, gender, and orientation with many of the older people needing and getting educated on the concepts of gender fluidity and non-binary orientations, rather than being inclusive in the sense that during Pride Month we invite others to join with us and we with them to share the moment, leaders of Pride organizations chose to throw a tarp over what Pride Month is all about and handing it completely over to those to whom we should be allies.
Before the pandemic with its social isolation, I was asked to submit some artwork for a Pride Art show to be held in June. Along with more recent works, I went into boxes and found a few political cartoons going back to my Red State Nineties hoping to present a before and after exhibit. Along with the pictures, I assembled a book that contained the texts of the blogs ,from which my political cartoon submissions came, for context.
When the art show became virtual because of the pandemic, because the books would not be viewable, I downloaded all the pictures from my Gay blogs, researched and found music in the public domain, and made a video presentation, and, as there was originally a fund-raising component to the original art show plan, added a link to my Gay ebook, pledging that out of the $1.05 royalty I get for each book sold, half would go to the Pride organization.
But June came, and there was no art show link on the Pride committee’s website. Thinking I was too much of a techno-peasant to be able to find the right link, I wrote to the Pride organizer asking about the Pride Art show, and was informed,
“We have dedicated all of the work we do for the black lives matter movement. We will continue the art gallery hopefully in 2021”.
Pride was shelved for the sake of another movement of whom we are allies. Pride Month was simply handed over to someone else and, once again, Pride and all it meant for the Gay Community, was moved out of the way to wait until next year.
Perhaps, having never been told that other, more important things than Gay rights and student safety needed to be dealt with and Gay equality will have to wait its turn somewhere down the road, the significance of putting the annual celebration of Pride off, even virtually, until next year seems to have been lost.
At least, I thought, with parades, festivals and other large gatherings to celebrate Pride having to be cancelled, I saw this as a chance to speak my Pride, educate about past struggles, and, through the blogs printed in the books, introduce the people of my present to the people who so richly joined my life in my past, and to the things they had done to make the world a little easier for all of us.
It is one thing to emphasize a social concern and including it as a major focus, it is another to put Pride in the closet to give an ally total attention, and removing the voices who intended to speak of their Pride within their proud artistic community.
A group of people decided that Pride could just so easily be put aside, and this was preferable to inviting others to share our month with us as we supported their cause and invited them to be part of what makes us proud.
There is, as we too often heard in the past, always next year.
Let’s hope something more than our pride in our community’s accomplishments and the members of it doesn’t come around next year for us to hand our month off to someone and wait quietly for our turn.