When Gay Pride Became Pride™

Musings on the devolution of an event I used to enjoy

Simpler times: One of my drawings from the 2004 In Newsweekly Pride Guide, spoofing rainbow-decorated tchotchke.

Before I moved to Florida in 2017, I worked for many years in the fragrance/cosmetic department at Saks Fifth Avenue in Boston. As you may or may not know, this section of the store is (basically) comprised of straight women and gay men. The last couple of years working there I noticed that the straight women were as excited about Pride as the gay guys—maybe even more excited. The parade route traveled down Boylston Street, right where we were located, and the ladies couldn’t wait to run outside on their lunch break to gawk and cheer. My friend/coworker Ellen tried to get me to come along and didn’t understand why I wasn’t into it. I told her that while I was proud to be gay, it was not exactly something I wanted to celebrate; it was more of a hassle. “Can we have a Hassle Parade?” She thought that was really funny.

I was over Pride and the spectacle it had become. That was only six years ago, but what I wouldn’t give for THAT compared to what we have NOW. At least Pride still had some semblance of gayness. Here in 2023, they may SAY ‘LGBTQIA+’ but what they MEAN is TTTTQIA+. ‘Pride’ is now ALL about trans and gender ideology, and straight people cosplaying as oppressed FOMOsexuals. It’s an insult and a joke. A sickening, corporate-sponsored joke.

…that goes on for a month.

Yes, a whole fucking MONTH. It used to be a march, which turned into a parade, which turned into a day, which turned into a weekend, which turned into a week, and now it’s an entire month.

But Pride had to grow from one day to a whole month because otherwise how would Target sell through their inventory of ostentatious rainbow-drenched crap?! A walk through the Pride™ section is an assault on the eyes. (The fact that stores have a whole Pride SECTION is unbelievable in itself.)

In its current obnoxious form, Pride is like that friend who turns 26 and proclaims “It’s my birthday month!!” and expects you to go out drinking with her every night for 31 days. Bitch, 26 is no milestone and we’ve celebrated you plenty already. Here’s your cake, now shut the fuck up and sit down.

Before you accuse me of being a bitter old queen…well, OK, I am. But I’m officially an Elder Gay now¹, so I’ve earned the right to be cranky. I wear it like a badge of honor. I’m old enough to remember How Things Used To Be…and that makes me dangerous to the Rainbow Mafia.

I have a lot of Prides under my belt, and yes, many of them were fun! Also, some were exhausting, some were depressing…just like all holidays. You might have heard gay people joke about Pride being the ‘Gay Christmas’. I always thought the comparison was accurate:

• It’s been completely commercialized, and the original meaning has been lost.

• Like some Christians who only show up for church on Christmas Eve, we had the more ‘homebody’ gays who avoided the bars and clubs year-round, and only came out to watch the parade.

• It starts waaaay before the actual date and seemingly goes on forever.

• You feel pressure to participate.

• You totally overindulge and feel sick at the end of it.

• It really is ‘for the kids’.

When I was doing my comic strip back in the early 2000’s, I had a dream of making an animated TV special with this idea, spoofing/loosely paralleling the plot of ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’. One of my characters was to be tasked with planning a Pride parade float, only to find that his friends were more interested in partying and hooking up than helping him construct a tribute to heroes from gay history. I worked on a script for a while, but I could never find the perfect passage to be the equivalent of Linus’ biblical speech explaining “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

This project never came to fruition, but I DID, however, get to experience the dream of having my own Pride float, when my newspaper put me in charge in 2005. It was a thrill to see my characters larger than life, parading down Boston’s streets:

That year had a sports theme for some weird reason, so I made trading cards for each character and the float was a ‘locker room’ theme. (Coincidentally, a good excuse for guys in towels.)

We had a bubble machine, so the ‘shower scene’ left a trail of bubbles behind us as we shuffled along.

That’s me in the black baseball cap, leading the way.

I did a few Pride-themed comic strips in those years, and they were usually about the stress brought on by the increasing exhibitionism of the event, and the unrealistic body standards for gay men that went along with it:

It was a different time. This doesn’t really seem to be an issue in the current ‘body positive’ era…I’ll let you decide if things have gotten better or worse.

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As Pride has grown, it has become not just more commercialized, but omnipresent. It used to be something you could skip if you didn’t feel like attending, or miss entirely if you had other summer activities going on. Now it’s completely inescapable.

And it’s absolutely, positively not about being gay anymore. Straight people give me a weird look when I say this, but it’s true. When did the gay erasure start to happen? I don’t know exactly, but there were signs. Literally:

In 2007, I wanted to help promote a local drag king troupe via my lesbian storyline. Researching for this strip, I went outside to take a look at the banners hung up and down the city streets, I first noticed it: the absence of the words gay, lesbian, and bisexual. Not even ‘LGB’. All the signs had was lower-case ‘boston pride’ with a grouping of multi-colored polka dots. It occurred to me that someone driving through who was completely unfamiliar with Gay Pride would think these banners were promoting a celebration for…proud Bostonians. I mused about it and even complained about it to friends and coworkers, but everyone just shrugged. I should’ve pushed this more.

The removal of ‘gay, lesbian, bisexual’ allowed an opening for the alphabet soup. This was surely by design. The ‘T’ had already staked its place, and soon the other letters would follow.

And unfortunately, we have to acknowledge that there were some gay people in positions of power who all too willingly threw us under the bus in the service of a transgenda. I remember vividly a conversation with one of the editors from my newspaper. People love to give cartoonists unsolicited ideas (99% of the time terrible), and his suggestion was, “You should have one of your characters come out as trans. It’s the next big civil rights movement.”

“Interesting,” I said. But what I was thinking was, ‘My characters are GAY, not confused about their sex! And don’t tell me what the fuck to do with my comic.’

How did Gay Pride become Pride™? Well, let’s face it, fellow greying LGB’s: a lot of this is our fault. We should’ve balked when they started adding letters willy-nilly. When the corporations started coming to Gay Pride we should’ve said, No thanks. We don’t want you here. This is none of your concern. When the politicians came to us wearing rainbow boas, with votes and dollar signs in their eyes, instead of embracing them we should’ve said, Where the fuck have you been?! We should’ve fought the exploitation and excess instead of welcoming it or shrugging it off. How did we allow Pride to grow into the unstoppable monster it has become? Did we learn nothing from the fateful tale of Audrey II?!?!?

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The current young generation overzealously celebrating Pride™ don’t see any problems. They’re clueless—and you can’t really fault them. LGBTQIA+ is just another acronym for which they have no idea what the letters actually represent.² No one seems to care how or why the letters got mingled together, so the incompatibilities therein are never questioned. They accept this clusterfuck of sexualities and identities as a ‘community’ because they have grown up in an online world where a ‘community’ can be any assembled group of people, self-declared and untethered to a place or actual purpose. And the larger and more popular your community, the better. Making matters worse, they have teachers with snow-cone-colored hair who will gleefully validate their pronouns and affirm their gender-of-the-week, but are ignorant of any factual details of gay history.

If you’re wondering if I have a message to the younger generation of LGB’s and wanna-be’s—yes, I do:

Listen to your gay elders. [NO, I DON’T MEAN GEORGE TAKEI.]

Listen to those of us who actually know and remember that Gay Pride was started by gay men and lesbians, NOT ‘transwomen of color’. The truth is the truth.

Listen when we tell you this: We came out of the closet seeking acceptance, not validation. We didn’t fight for gay rights so that we could see ourselves represented in Cottonelle commercials. We didn’t march through the streets looking down and think, ‘this crosswalk needs to be rainbow-striped.’ We didn’t demand that every TV series and movie had to have a gay character; we would’ve been happy with just a few. Forcing hockey players to wear rainbow jerseys was not on our to-do list. The problem with the cops who raided the Stonewall Inn wasn’t that their police cruisers lacked flamboyance.

Gay Pride was about us showing up and asserting our place in society— asking for ‘a place at the table’, as the expression goes. We weren’t looking to take over the whole restaurant.

In other words, can we cool it with the excessiveness? Take it down maybe a few or hundred notches?

One more thing: We can also regale you with stories of a time when you could go to a bar or nightclub and be surrounded by people of your same sex—your same, actual, incontrovertible, mutually desirable biological sex. I can assure you we got along fine for decades without the need for pronouns (except maybe ‘Your place or mine?’).

1. This happens after you hit your mid-thirties and I’m 52 now so I’m actually a dinosaur. Fagasoreass.

2. For fun, ask a young person what ‘DJ’ stands for. They know what a DJ is, but have no idea what the letters stand for.