Less LGBTQ, More MYOB

Our employers need to stop pushing 'Pride'

June is approaching, so the horror of ‘Pride Month’ is on my mind. Every year I have to mentally prepare for the insulting and stressful Rainbow Shitshow.

You can't spell 'PRIDE' without D, E, & I.

‘Pride Month’ is the DEI department’s wet dream—an entire month to promote surface diversity and misplaced inclusion. A woman can self-harm and be celebrated for displaying her diversity; a man who throws a dress over his hairy body can be included as a lesbian. When nothing makes sense, anything goes, and the only rule is there are no rules…you need a whole month to pack in all the absurdities.

It became clear to me a few years ago the purpose of DEI: It’s a distraction. The employer gets workers so hyper-focused on their differences that we overlook the thing that makes us all similar—our low wages. So all year the company celebrates everyone’s various ethnicities during the designated week or month. Here’s how it is meant to work: Everyone gets placed in a category. The Puerto Rican employee thinks ‘wow, my company is recognizing my heritage!’ during Latinx Heritage Month; the Chinese employee thinks, ‘my company appreciates me!’ during Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month; and so on. Meanwhile, the white employee thinks, ‘Nobody is appreciating me…but I better keep my mouth shut or they’ll call me racist.’ This adds up to a win/win for the company because the employees are so busy feeling either appreciated or guilty that no one is concentrating on what we all have in common: our shitty unlivable salaries.

But what if some of those white employees start to catch on? This is where Pride Month provides an extra benefit. Anyone and everyone is welcome in the ‘LGBTQIA+ Community’! So those white employees who feel left out all year finally have a month to be celebrated! All you have to do is declare you’re ‘non-binary’ or ‘demisexual’ and YOU’RE IN THE CLUB! It takes very little effort—just announce some annoying pronouns, add some off-putting accessories, or invest in some blue hair dye—voilà, everyone has forgotten that you’re an oppressive privileged evil white monster.

And even if you don’t identify as one of the letters, you can be an ‘ally’! [How you can simultaneously be an ally to same-sex attracted people and sex-denying people is a mystery no one in DEI seems to want to confront.]

So ‘Pride’ overtakes the entire month of June at my job, with email greetings, rainbow balloons, cupcakes, flags, badges, and tacky merchandise. Don’t forget the bulletin boards filled with lies and propaganda that a ‘volunteer’ copy-and-pasted from the HRC website.

No, not from a kindergarten wall…from an adult workplace.

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I hate ‘Pride’ both because 1. It used to mean something, man and 2. It goes on waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. I’d be happy to go back to a one-day event that was just for gay people to get together and celebrate their community.¹ But even if it were to go back to that, I wouldn’t want my job to take notice. I’ve written before about the devolution of Pride…

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…but let me tell you more about the modest kind of Gay Pride that I miss:

The Gay 90’s

One of the first Gay Prides I remember was in Boston, 1992—but I didn’t attend. I was 21 and had my first boyfriend, which was really exciting. He was a year older than me but had been ‘out’ longer, so he seemed a lot more experienced to me. We were aware of the Gay Pride March (it was still called a march in those days—if you were gay, people would ask, ‘Are you going to march?”) but we ignored it, choosing to roam around the city and then hang out with our straight girl friends at their apartment. Later that night, I sheepishly admitted to him that I would have liked to have gone, and he told me that he had wanted to go too. We each had thought the other would think it was lame, so we both had acted like it was something we didn’t care about.

As years went by, Gay Pride soon evolved into a weekend. Saturday was the parade and Sunday was the AIDS Walk. The various big cities staggered these weekends throughout June so the Rich Gays (there have always been Rich Gays) could travel to all of them. But if you were an hourly retail wage-worker like me, you couldn’t afford to fly to various cities every weekend, and you wouldn’t have been able to get that many weekends off anyway. So you had to ask your manager for your local city’s Pride weekend off—even this might be tricky if you worked at a place with several homos; you had to make sure you got the jump on the other guys, because then who would watch the sales floor?! It was always better to work in a department with a good number of straight people. 🤓

The march/parade was pretty low-key. It began with the Dykes on Bikes. It always began with the Dykes on Bikes—this was a steadfast rule and they were a perennial crowd favorite. [These were butch lesbians on motorcycles, in case that was not clear.]

There were no politicians or corporate sponsors that I can recall. (Beer and vodka companies had a huge presence at some point; I can’t remember exactly when that started.)

There were drag queens, but they didn’t have the aggressiveness of today’s drag queens. How can I put this? They didn’t try as hard. I think they were just happy to be there. (They certainly weren’t looking to get any record deals out of the event, as the Drag Race queens are today.) It was dress-up. It was something to do as a lark, not as a career. And they stayed away from kids.

My friends and I were young, so we had the brattiness that comes with that, and we always made fun of the ‘Gays for Patsy’ float (older gay men who were Patsy Cline fans) but now that I am of the age of those gentlemen, I wince at the memory. They were having fun and actually had a community. I don’t have any of that now.

There were political messages, probably, but my friends and I were not very political. President Clinton didn’t think gays should be in the military, but as someone who felt terrified whenever I had to register for selective service, that was fine by me. And gay marriage? That was nowhere on our radar. You know what was a big deal that often got discussed? Holding hands. We just wanted to be able to hold hands in public without getting beaten up.

There was a ‘film festival’ at a tiny venue with folding chairs and a rented pull-down screen. They showed low budget gay-themed arthouse flicks for a couple of nights. I remember thinking, ‘Is that safe? Homophobes will know there are a bunch of homosexuals in this building and could attack or bomb us!’

And what was my job’s involvement in Gay Pride? There wasn’t any. And we didn’t expect any. Why would we? Who wants their employer thinking about their sex life?!

Here’s the only work connection I recall: I used to go around my job collecting money for the AIDS Walk. My straight coworkers showed their support to gay people by donating money to a worthy cause. They didn’t show up at the parade adopting a ‘Queer’ identity so they could feel oppressed too.

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The decades have gone by and we eventually got the greater gay acceptance we wanted…but where has it led us? Homophobia is back with a vengeance. And now we have a month every year devoted to my employer making me feel uncomfortable, angry, embarrassed, nervous, and stressed out.

I am of the belief that both DEI and ‘Pride Month’ need to end. Both are inauthentic. Both activate more hate and discrimination, rather than combatting those things. Hopefully, DEI is on its way out. I’ll be watching, as I do every year, to see how ‘Pride Month’ evolves/devolves.

I want a separation from LGB & TQetc. Recent developments have been a pleasantly surprising and unexpected step in that direction. I can only hope that each year, as the TQ+ faction gets more insane, more LGB’s wake up and say, ‘no thank you, I don’t want any part in this.’

I do not need my employer to ‘validate’ me for my same-sex attraction. I really don’t care how my employer feels about my love/sex life. M.Y.O.B., you creeps. I do not need or want an ENTIRE MONTH to celebrate my gayness.² In fact, I do not want to be celebrated at all. And at this point, it feels more like exploitation than celebration. I want to be celebrated (and compensated) because I am damn good at my job; not because I am a gay person who my employer has found it in their heart to accept. I am not here for them to score points on their DEI checklist. I have come to dread the month of June and the endless tributes for the ‘LGBTQIA+ Community’. Please exclude me in any ‘Inclusion’ efforts.

1. Make Pride Gay Again/Make Pride One Day Again

2. (And I ESPECIALLY do not want to be grouped together with posers, sex pests, and autogynephiles.)