NEAR THE FRONT of the pride parade in Minneapolis this year marched a stern-faced woman dressed in leather-dominatrix regalia leading around by spiked chain and whip a person (sex undetermined) hunched over and disguised as a four-legged beast, probably a horse. Similar displays - which are less about "being yourself" than about simply being seen - assaulted the senses in parades around the country. I ask you, must we continue to put ourselves through this every year?
For the most part, the annual pride parades are a dreary procession of the ordinary: businesses, politicians, gay professionals, and social service organizations wanting money. Where they are not dreary, however, the parades seem calculated to offend the very folk we must win over.
In the 1970s, the parades served the important purpose of giving gays a sense of community and identity necessary to organize in a time when there were no positive images of gays in the mass media, when most states had sodomy laws, and when homosexuality was still officially listed as a mental disorder. In the 1980s, they helped rally us against AIDS. Always characterized by an in-your-face outrageousness, the parades nevertheless had some offsetting value.
But in the age of Will & Grace, when even Republicans are coming around, the parades are an anachronism, perpetuated more out of habit and nostalgia than necessity.
There is an inverse relationship between the degree of weirdness in a city's pride parade and the genuine need for that parade. In the big cities, where the parades are the most outlandish, they serve the least useful purpose. New York, San Francisco, Washington, Houston, and other large American cities are dotted with gay bars, restaurants, and book stores. They have gay bowling leagues and choruses and political groups and civil rights ordinances. A parade designed to foster awareness and community in these cities is an expensive and time-consuming redundancy.
Maybe, you say, the big-city parades benefit people in the surrounding suburbs and small towns. The gay Chicagoan may not need a parade to feel proud but the closeted guy from Peoria needs the Chicago parade to have just one day a year to commune with other gay people. There's surely some benefit to that.
Yes, but at what cost? If our concern is truly to give hope to the gay people who live in the hinterlands, the pride parades may do more harm than good. Simulated sex acts, near-naked men gyrating to music, and bare-breasted women don't play well in Peoria. And like it or not when the local nightly news there turns to gay pride, that's what plays.
That can't be good for the social environment in which gay Peorians must live and work. It hardens anti-gay attitudes, frightening Americans with what they imagine a gay-friendly future would look like. As a result, parents come down harder on any hint of homosexuality in their children. It doesn't matter that these images are unrepresentative of gay life; to Americans who live nowhere near a gay coffee shop, that's what gay means.
And unfortunately it's what gay comes to mean to youths wrestling with their own feelings of same-sex attraction. As a teenager growing up in southern Texas, I saw footage of S&M leather fetishists in the San Francisco parade. If that's gay, I thought, I must not be gay.
Gay youth around the country are forced into the closet by these parades, either because of the backlash they suffer in their communities or because of their own alienation from the public image of gayness thus created.
So there is a large hidden human cost to these displays. It's awfully selfish for us in big cities to have this fabulous annual party at their expense.
What's the alternative? We'll never get the media to stop focusing on the sensational. That's not because the media are uniformly homophobic; it's because they're profit-driven, profits are determined by audience size, and audiences prefer outrageous to dreary. It doesn't matter how many contingents of gay-suburbanite couples proudly brandish their joint mortgage statements, the TV stations will still feature the square-dancing drag queens.
It's also not an option to exclude weirdness from the parades. First of all, we could never agree on what's weird. Second, even if we could, people would scream censorship. Third, parade organizers tend to be so drenched in the easy rhetoric of inclusion and diversity they could never be trusted to make sensible judgments about such things.
The answer is to end the parades, at least in the big cities, where the weirdness of them is at a maximum and the need for them is at a minimum.
We should replace them with park festivals featuring civil rights and other groups with booths, food, and live concerts. That would make the annual pride celebrations fun and informative while minimizing the incentive for counterproductive media spectacles. Something like this already happens in most cities at the end of the parade. Let's skip the parade and go straight to the festival.
The parades themselves could justifiably go on in medium- and small-sized cities where they now flourish. Parades in these places tend to reflect the values and tastes of local communities, which can actually help the gay people who live there.
And no, this is not a proposal to "hide" the marginalized. Hey, if you want to walk around dressed as a farm animal, go for it.
But don't ask us to have a parade for you.