Pride and Prejudice

I confess I don't usually attend Pride. In recent years I've found it a bit too commercial. I also find the LGBTQIA+ community to work best as a political coalition but, in all honesty I prefer the company of other lesbians. We may be LGBTQIA+ family but each letter is a separate subculture. We look out for our own, have our own history, rituals, traditions and beliefs. And like all families we fight. Our infighting can be worse than threats from outsiders. When pressed though we can function as one unit. I love my extended LGBTQIA+ community but I don't alway like them. That's okay.

This year is different. This year is the first time in awhile I've felt Pride really embodying it's original intention. Pride is a political act. Pride isn't safe. Pride is about being seen and taking back our space. We're here. We're queer. Get used to it. We aren't going anywhere. Pride is a spectacle with drag queens, drag kings, dykes on bikes, leather and nudity.

Pride isn't a little street festival, just something to do over the weekend. We go to Pride with intention. We go to Pride at great personal cost to ourselves. We go to Pride to be seen in our most queer identites. We do not soften them. We do not cover them.

Queer covering, described by Kenji Yoshino in his book Covering: the Hidden Assult on Our Civil Rights, describes a survival technique used by queer people to tone down a disfavorable identity. Maybe it's acting less "femme" if you are a man at work or dressing more feminine if you are a woman. It can be keeping your personal life to yourself. Not being in the closet exactly, just not being upfront that your new boyfriend is actually your new girlfriend. Maybe you deflect and ask the other women at work about the new men in their lives avoid talking about the woman in yours. We trade the motorcycles for the mom van, the crew cuts for curls and say "see? We're just like you. We live in the suburbs with our kids."

Pride is a point of contention when it comes to covering. Pride is the opposite of covering, or it was. Now, we want Neil Patrick Harris to move next door and Ellen DeGeneres on the PTA. We would rather not have the bear in leather next door. Marriage is something the mainstream understands, landdykes? Not so much. But, covering isn't working.

A gay night club in Orlando was the target of the recent shooting. Our bars, like Pride are places we don't cover. Last time I was at a gay bar I watched a burlesque dancer with tassels on her ass. There's smoke machines, flashing lights, and sometimes a guy in only a jockstrap handing out glow sticks. We grind with our partners on the dance floor. We make out. Maybe we have sex in the bathroom. Straight bars, or as we typically call them--bars, aren't like that. But that's because the gay bar is one place our sexuality is normalized.

And that's why some people are silent about the attack. Do you have to be that kind of gay? Do you have to be so wild? It's that kind of behavior that makes people uncomfortable. We get it from our own sometimes. Don't be so "faggy" don't be too "butch." it shows people are still uneasy, we have not yet reached the level of comfort with assless chaps as we have marriage.

But consider this, where do you see heterosexual behavior? On billboards, in commercials, in magazines, in movies. You don't have to go to a special section of the store to find straight porn and the actors in your porn will probably actually be heterosexuals having heterosexual sex. Gay porn is often made by straight actors for straight consumers. No one has lesbian sex with press-on nail-claws unless it's in a porno or a cautionary tale about the dangers of long nails. On TV we see straight actors on top of each other gyrating pretending to have sex. We don't see a whole lot of kissing, or even hand-holding with queer people. In fact many times we don't even get confirmation a character is queer. Yet, were pretty aware which characters on television are straight.

Society may be okay with gay people in theory. They are not okay with what we do. It's love the sinner hate the sin. That's not good enough. Yes, you love us as people, but are you okay with us expressing our love as you do yours? If you feel weird about the shooting the answer is no. You like gays but not "that kind" of gay. You like gays but not the "really faggy" ones or the "really butch" ones. You like gay people who could pass for heterosexuals but simply aren't. And you want these heterosexual-looking gays to act asexual in public.

That's why a night club was targeted. It targeted our uncovered selves, our sexual behavior, our audacity to do in public what we do in private. It was an attack on our refusal to cover.