Too proud?: A debate on Gay Pride

So it seems that my seemingly innocuous Pride week calendar stoked a bit of a debate over at a blog called Bookworm Room. (This is a long post, but I think you'll find the back-and-forth worthwhile.)

From Bookworm's post:

I’m quite libertarian about what people do in the privacy of their own homes.  I really don’t care with whom you sleep, as long as its consensual and you keep the details to yourself.  I don’t expect you, if you’re gay, to keep that fact to yourself.  After all, the mere fact that I have a husband is a public announcement that I am heterosexual, isn’t it? 

Nevertheless, beyond the identity of your partner, which you are allowed to share with me, there is nothing more I want to know about your sex life. What I’ve noticed over the years, though, is that, because the only thing that distinguishes gays from others is their sex life, politicized gays have become very opening about place their sex lives front and center.  I can see why they do it.  If they don’t, they’re just you and me, only with different bed mates.

Why does this behavior matter?  Because of the way in which Gay Pride celebrations, played out on the streets of San Francisco, tend to be overtly sexual. [...] I think I would be very much more sympathetic to the Gay rights and Gay pride movement if it would observe a “less is more” philosophy. When one adds to the fact that I’ve always been a bit of a prude the fact that I’m now a mother, I see in myself less and less sense of fellowship with a group that’s gone from being downtrodden to being a group that flaunts its often extreme sexuality in the very streets on which my little ones walk.  A gay lawyer is someone with whom I can identify.  A gay genital binder who uses a social/political parade to demonstrate his sexual preferences just offends me.

I'm just fine with this, at least until she wanders into "but-what-about-the-children" territory. It's a reasonable and heartfelt post from a concerned Mom who thinks that Gay Pride is perhaps counterproductive.

But oh, the comments [all sic].

Commenter "Scott D.": I’ve been places where some of the more flamboyantly gay are being loud and obnoxious, now forcibly involving those around them in their antics. One would be whistling and cat-calling others, and finally it was put to a halt. I don’t treat women like that, and I have no intention of letting it go on in a harassing manner around me, no matter what special minority group you’re in.

Commenter "Ymarsakar": If [gay people] were truly downtrodden [...] society would never tolerate such public acts without responding with terrorism, lawfare prosecution, and various other things you’ve seen people wage on Bush and the US military.

Commenter "Thomas": I can think of no other subset of humanity that hate themselves more than the gays do. Over the years I’ve heard of their self-destructive behaviors down in brothels, and I’ve also been witness to an overt attempt at suicide. I view these kinds of exhibitions as gays baiting the tiger, if you will. In typical defiant fashion— since society says they shouldn’t exist on multiple levels and should it be found that they exist in material and genetic fact, they should keep their mouths shut about it— they come out and flaunt it all over the place and rub people’s noses in it. This is not how you garner friends and allies. This is baiting the tiger; this is how society might decide to erase the gay issue entirely by outlawing it once again. We are seeing a “law and order” wave coming into society; a society that is less tolerant, more orderly, collective based rather than individual based, more harsh in its judgments. The extremities of the Baby Boomers would come to an end and the “traditionalists” and the “law and order” wave will assert itself on the national level. When this wave comes into full fruition in about four to ten years and if these kinds of offensive behaviors continue, homosexuals may wake to find themselves outlawed and even jailed, which has been the way of things in the United States not so long ago.

Commenter "11B40": I think you have arrived at the tip of the “tyranny of the minorities” iceberg. Once society accepts the “victimized” status of sub-groups, it, to a large degree, loses its social control over that group’s behavior. To condemn any behavior, no matter how outrageous, becomes a continuation of the prior oppression. There are clear evidences of increasing behavioral excesses in the sub-cultures of all designated “victim” groups. The homosexuals may effect your “wisdom of repugnance” more than others but if you think about what you’re not seeing of other sub-groups (the rest of the iceberg), you may realize the depth of the problem. B.F. Skinner, the noted psychologist, wrote that “rewarded behavior tends to be repeated.” He left out the “in spades.” I believe that these increasingly deviant sub-group behaviors are an addictive form of retribution against the larger society. As many of us know, one of the signs of addiction is habituation which lessens the desired effect and results in the need for larger and larger dosages. By foregoing its societal authority to sanction or correct these behaviors, the larger culture loses its moral underpinnings and allows the minorities behavioral autonomy (think, “it’s a black thing). Each group gets its unimpeachable slice of the cultural salami until there is little left to provide sustenance.

Then "Thomas" re-enters the fray, but this time he doesn't sound like a Fox News employee:

Perhaps it would be ill advised to judge the homosexual community based on these gay pride parades. Besides, judging by that criteria would be like judging Women’s Rights by the exploits of Gloria Steinem and the other unshaven militant feminists. I don’t think anyone would argue against a woman’s right to vote, nor a woman getting paid the same wages for the same work as men do.

Should all these rights be rolled back because many women have become ball crushing goddesses? Of course not. This is simply the price of freedom. Freedom allows for the potential of great achievements and great abuses. This is true for all minority groups, including gays, and not just women.

So the question, I believe is, how much freedom should be curtained to anyone one group in order for the collective to reach a livable equilibrium? I don’t have the answers to that, and I’ll be surprised if anyone does because this is the conversation America’s been having since its inception. As far as I know, it hasn’t been resolved yet, but it sure does make for great debates and discussions.

Here's Bookworm's measured and reasonable response in the thread:

The young gays — my generation and younger — were intentionally politicized, every last one of them. They bought into the concept that coming out of the closet automatically meant coming into your face, whether aggressively, or with a sort of sweet, drag queen loopiness. If you want an insight into the thinking that surrounded me when I grew up, check out the Armistead Maupin books, which are San Francisco gay anthems.

Likewise, for a good look at both the incredible talent and the up-front hostility to mainstream America that you’ll find in the SF gay community, check out the Kinsey Sicks. I knew/know several of the men in it (school and professional connections), and I can tell you that they are fairly hostile to traditional American values (which are, for them, wrapped up in a Republican package). They’re extremely talented, amusing, loving to their friends and family, clever, and they don’t like straight America and what it stands for.

And then I, perhaps inadvisedly, decided to join in.

In my blog on Examiner.com, I’ve written several times that I find the phrase “gay community” troubling. (A quote from my very first post: “A community doesn’t exist simply by defaulting to sexual identity.”) I’ve never been completely gung-ho about the extreme commercialization of Gay Pride in large cities, and many of my gay friends share my ambivalence.

But I’ve seen the other side of it, too. I grew up in Spokane, Washington, and one of my first Pride events was the very meek and tiny Spokane Pride Parade, in which a small crowd of gay people walks a few blocks on a Sunday morning in June, followed by an event in Riverfront Park. Despite its small size (or perhaps because of it), the Spokane event carried a certain urgency, because it actually seemed to mean something in a community where gay people didn’t feel particularly accepted, let alone embraced.

Now, after living in Seattle and San Francisco and sitting through numerous Pride celebrations that have virtually no political relevance in super-liberal communities, I’ve always yearned just a bit for the relative radicalism of Spokane’s much more modest parade. But that doesn’t mean I’d want to go back to Spokane. For all that I sometimes chafe against San Francisco’s self-impressed gay “community,” I wouldn’t want to return to a city where being gay was a genuine struggle at times, both in terms of acceptance from my family and in terms of feeling somewhat unsafe. (For one thing, I appreciate that complete strangers don’t spit the word “faggot” at me in San Francisco as they did on an alarmingly regular basis in Spokane.)

That said, much of this comment thread frustrates me. I always find blanket statements about the “younger generation” really galling; I’m 31, and the gay guys I know are all over the place politically and socially. Some are Huckabee-loving Republicans who hate identity politics in all its forms; some are buttoned-down liberals who take an essentially conservative approach to their personal sexual expression; others frequent leather bars on a near-daily basis. I find all of these guys a kick in different ways, but then I’ve always preferred to surround myself with people who offer up perspectives different from my own.

I don’t believe that any of my close friends plan to attend the Pride Parade on Sunday — most of them think (and I would tend to agree) that it’s an overinflated celebration of “community” dominated by people who thrive on drawing attention to themselves. Anyone who imagines that what’s on display during the Pride Parade is somehow broadly representative of gay men and women today is taking far too many cues from Focus on the Family.

I suspect that many of you know gay men and women in your personal lives, and I suspect that many of you respect or even love some of them. Those people should be the basis on which you make judgments about the appropriateness of “the behavior” of homosexuality. Gay people are not monolithic; they don’t all gather together once a year and agree on how they should be represented in this silly parade. Like the rest of America, they’re a pluralistic bunch of souls who sometimes smack their foreheads when they see other gay people behaving poorly.

On balance, I like the pluralism and wackiness and anything-goes mentality of gay San Francisco (yes, even of the Folsom Street Fair). I understand very well that many gay people aren’t comfortable with those aspects of gay urban life, and that many of them choose to live elsewhere, or to live quieter lives in quieter neighborhoods in this city. I respect and welcome their dissension, as I respect and welcome yours.

Bookworm responded very quickly with a lovely email which she cross-posted on the comment thread:

Thank you so much for the thoughtful comment you left at my blog. My blog is distinguished by a civil tone (although people aren’t shy about expressing their widely varying opinions), and your comment fit right in with the intellectual atmosphere of my site.

As for me, I grew up in SF, and sometimes feel as if half my graduating class turned out gay. I’ve always had very dear gay friends, or at least I did in my single days. As a married with children in the suburbs, gays aren’t a part of my life at all. (That goes back to my tribalism point about like hanging with like.)

As I think you realized, my post was not a generic slap at homosexuality (and the et ceteras of lesbians, transgender, etc.). Instead, it’s a comment on a very disturbing trend of saturnalia, that has grown steadily more, well, vulgar, since the 1970s.

I was hoping to make the point that, perhaps, more mainstream gays, the ones who live, as I do, quiet suburban lives, might want to disassociate themselves from the bacchanal of gay pride parades. The parades and attendant public displays of sexuality may not be, as you said, broadly representative of average gay men and women today, but they are certainly the public voice of the movement, and there is no doubt that they attract tens of thousands of gays from all over the world.

Just FYI, both because (as I said in my post) I’m a prude and a parent, I’m having a hard time coming to terms with the public nudity and blatantly sexual behavior that is becoming part and parcel of urban life — especially San Francisco urban life. It took me a couple of days to get my children over the gross factor, when we went to Bay to Breakers, of seeing men waggling their chained and bound weenies at the children. We thought we’d see wacky costumes, not behaviors better left to very select bedrooms. I have the same visceral, unhappy reaction the Pride Parade.

At that point, the comments grew steadily more disturbing. Commenter "Ymarsakar" was the first to throw down the "Islamic jihad" gauntlet.

It is easily demonstrable that all Leftist organizations have a hierarchy in which at the top resides people like Saul Alinsky, Gore, and various other spiritual leaders that write the word of God so that the believers, meaning the regular fake liberals which comprise the majority of the Democrat party, and at the bottom resides anybody that has been caught in their (the top hieriarchy’s) arbitrary net of political identity or affiliation.

Meaning, it is just like a union. The hierarchy demands and the union members pay, regardless of what a union member’s politics may be, the union leaders are the one that decides where the money goes and which party benefits. In any political or group identity hierarchy, it is the ones most active and motivated that decide the direction of the group. It is not the most numerous, as popular opinion might hold, but the most active, the most fervent, and the most zealous.

The quiet ones staying in the background and living peaceful lives in suburbia, well nobody hears them and that’s to be expected cause they are neither active, zealous, nor fervent believers in X. The same is dynamic is true of the Islamic Jihad as well, in that 1-5% of the active participants decide for 95% of the rest of the population what they are going to, when they are going to do it, and who they are going to kill to do it to.

Commenter "Suek" was quick to pile on the "jihadist" thread.

Just as we complain that the muslim who just wants to live their life and wants nothing to do with terrorists are doing nothing to condemn terrorists, gays have an obligation to speak up and condemn the extremists of their community. Blacks have the same obligation. We _all_ need to condemn the _extremists_ that result in law being ignored by “special” groups. Favoristism is allowing _any_ group to get away with illegal behavior that on any other day in any other setting by any ordinary citizen would result in a person’s arrest and conviction.

In fact, if someone was arrested in SF anytime, anywhere, for indecent exposure, I’d think they could have the case thrown out on the basis of prejudice and being arbitrary - that the police allowed it for some and not for others. And have the pictures to prove it.

Anarchy is their goal.

And then "BrianE," the biggest charmer of the bunch:

In 1972 the APA removed homsexuality from the list of deviant behaviors.

They were too quick to abandon their assessment. [...] Wherever a person stands on the issue of homosexuality, I would hope our standards as citizens rises slightly above these obscene acts.

These are sick people.

At last I couldn't resist posting a response to the latest developments in the thread.

Let’s leave the comparisons to jihadists out, shall we? That’s really unnecessary. I don’t appreciate being compared to someone who has a death wish both for themselves and for America.

Pride parades began in the early ’70s to provide visibility for gay people who faced ferocious opposition from almost all of American society. Those parades were radical, outrageous, and yes, offensive even by contemporary standards of offense.

This year’s Pride parade will be a commercialized, politically neutered, let’s-get-drunk-and-be-outrageous extension of those first Pride parades. It is no longer grassroots, but it’s not exactly mainstream, either. Like so much of gay culture, Pride celebrations keep one foot in the past (when we were radical minorities) and one foot in the present (when more and more of us are assimilating into what many of you would call mainstream culture and values).

To read many of your comments, one would think that gay people are oppressing you on a daily basis. I don’t think I’m going to weep for you yet. When we talk about “middle American values,” let’s please remember that those values reign supreme across large swathes of America. The values on display in the San Francisco Pride parade are values that have only gained traction in a few urban areas of this country, with some obvious reverberations on college campuses. No one’s oppressing you. Stop playing the straight-laced victim, please.

I particularly found this comment disturbing: “Gays have an obligation to speak up and condemn the extremists of their community. Blacks have the same obligation.” Uh, what about whites? Don’t you have an obligation to condemn white fundamentalist preachers who go a long way toward making so many gay kids angry and alienated in the first place? I see a great deal of complacency in this thread — not one of you has suggested that the mainstream values you hold so dear, however well-intentioned they may be, might sometimes cause damage and deep resentment.

I just checked back, and the thread continues. Let's just say I didn't expect this when I posted that calendar on Monday morning.

 

Topics: Gay , Gay politics , Gay culture , Gay events , Gay Pride , SF Gay Pride , Pride 2008 , SF Pride