First appeared June 3, 1999, in the Windy City Times.
Along about this time o' year,
My po'r ol' heart fills up with fear.
Examinations 'r comin' roun'-
Like to drive a fella right to the groun'.
- From "The Talking Examination Blues" (circa 1955)
ALONG ABOUT THIS TIME OF YEAR my own poor old heart fills up with fear mainly because editors start making aggressive noises about Stonewall Anniversaries and Gay Pride columns.
Gay Pride is coming up again," they chirp. "You know what that means."
It means I have to think of something new to say about gay pride. This year is even worse.
"And it's the 30th anniversary of Stonewall," they inform me, as if I could escape this fact. "Isn't that exciting?" they burble. But that's ancient history, for goodness sake. In 1969 most young gays weren't even born. Especially most gays under thirty. We might as well celebrate the Battle of Tours, whenever that was.
What is there to say about gay pride? Worse yet, what is there new to say about gay pride? Not much. Nevertheless, yielding to editorial persuasion, and the fact that I would like to keep my job, I have come up with the definitive schema on gay pride. Feel free to take notes.
Thesis one: Being gay is wonderful and we all should feel proud that we are gay.
Put this way the idea of gay pride seems pretty silly. You can really only feel proud about the things you accomplish. But being gay is not something you accomplish; it is something you discover about yourself. You do not choose to be gay any more than you choose your race or height or your eye color.
This is a definitive argument against the whole notion of gay pride. There is no possible rebuttal. Which accounts for the fact that no one bothers to rebut it. But oddly, it makes almost no impression on anyone at all.
People go right ahead talking about gay pride, saying they feel gay pride, claiming they are glad to be gay, and all the rest. So we must try to make sense of what seems on the surface to be nonsensical. This leads to:
Thesis two: True, you don't choose to be gay, but you can choose to come out and you can take pride in coming out, in having the courage to overcome social stigma and affirm your own character.
This thesis at least has the advantage of being defensible. But coming out is getting easier and easier, at least in most places, so coming out is not such a big deal any more. Fifteen year old tots are coming out these days, so doing it in your 20s or 30s does not seem like much of an achievement, much less a source of pride.
Then too, I have known people who are out of the closet but who conduct their lives badly. They may be rude and insensitive. They may act foolishly and even destructively. They can cause pain to others and themselves. Maybe they thought that after they came out, they had no further obligations--as if that were all. Are they examples of gay pride? Not that I would want to introduce to anyone. Sometimes I wish they would just go back into the closet. (I have a list.) These plain facts lead us to:
Thesis three: "Being gay" is, in an important sense, more than just being openly homosexual. It seems to require that you develop the strength of character, the emotional stability, and social equipoise to live openly and function well in a primarily heterosexual society that still offers many opportunities for missteps and miscalculations.
Flourishing in this milieu necessarily involves rolling with some punches, evading others, blocking some karate chops, and occasionally using jujitsu to throw an adversary off-balance. (These are metaphors, please note.) It can also include firm resistance and a calm assertion of one's own dignity. The trick is to understand these techniques and to know which is appropriate under what circumstances. Some gays, alas, do not manage their lives well under these intermittently adverse circumstances. if you can, that is something to take pride in.
Still, the Gay Pride parades and events as we see them today do not seem so individualistic as all this. They do not seem to be involve a collection of people expressing pride about achieving social adeptness. So what is going on? This leads us to:
Thesis four: A gay person might say he was proud of our community and the institutions that we have created over the last thirty or forty years. We created social service, health care institutions and advocacy groups. We created clubs, sports leagues and business groups. We increased our political presence in both parties and in large corporations. Of all these accomplishments we can be proud.
But there is a problem here. The "we" that did the work to create "our" community is some of us "we" but not others of us "we." Some of us "we" (and you know who you are) did absolutely nothing to help. In order to be justifiable, pride in anything should probably be proportional to the contribution a person made to it. Just being around while other people did some work does not seem like much of an achievement.
A person could reply, maybe somewhat testily, "Well, those things show what gays can achieve." So they do. And that is excellent. And people who created those things deserve the credit and deserve to feel a sense of pride. But what about the others? It seems a little odd to say you are proud of someone else's hard work. That sort of collective thinking ultimately seems parasitic; it seems strange to be proud of being a parasite. So we wind up at our final rationale for gay pride:
Thesis five: "gay pride" may lack a firm basis in careful thinking, but it is an entirely understandable and reasonable reaction to past persecution and stigmatization. It represents a kind of over-compensation. Proclaiming "Gay Pride" is something like an archer who aims above the target in order to hit the target. We tell people to be proud in order to overcome the negative messages the culture sends.
Well and good, but since our goal is a society in which gay is viewed as no different from heterosexual, "gay pride" is at best a temporary response in our current transitional era. As acceptance of gays grows over time, it will become less significant, and will finally be irrelevant.
If this is true, then "Gay Pride" is mainly a form of PR propaganda aimed both at the large number of gays who have yet to fully accept themselves, and at those heterosexuals who still find themselves able to feel a smug, disdainful superiority to gays.
This rationale for "Gay Pride" has the most merit, chiefly because it is the most honest.
See you at the parade.