Freedom Socialist • Vol. 19, No. 2 • July-September 1998
Challenging "Gay Pride, Inc."
Let's put the spirit of Stonewall back into our annual celebrations by Jordana Sardo It's great to be out of the closet! Every year around the world on Gay Pride Day, city streets are filled with thousands of queers and their supporters in a celebration of freedom.
Amid feather boas, leather, tennis shoes, and T-shirts, the diverse human sexual spectrum emerges and demands equality. Gay Pride is an annual reunion, a rowdy time, and a show of force, all rolled into one.
Gay Pride Day commemorates the Stonewall Rebellion in June, 1969, when drag queens, dykes, queer street kids, and transvestites rioted for three nights against police harassment in New York City. Within two weeks, the Gay Liberation Front was founded, and a year later the first pride march transpired on the anniversary of the melee with the cops.
In the nearly three decades since, the gay community has transformed, matured, and won impressive gains. But alongside the growth have come divisions. And nowhere are the rifts more evident than at the annual pride events, where, for one day out of the year, every stratum of the community comes together to march, to rub elbows - and often, to butt heads.
One clear issue has emerged: Will Gay Pride Day remain true to its feisty political roots in the Stonewall uprising? Or will it be "privatized," taken over by entrepreneurs for whom the primary meaning of Pride is profits?
Tug-of-war. The numbers of people attending Pride each year continue to grow, and most who turn out do so to proclaim a sense of collective identity.
However, the huge crowds have also attracted swarms of promoters, politicians and salesmen. In many cities, the event has become a big business controlled by "producers" who push to censor what can be expressed until the occasion is completely de-politicized, homogenized, and commercialized.
But for a community that is still largely invisible for most of the year, Pride Day remains, despite all its flamboyance and carnival atmosphere, first and foremost a chance to feel and exert a sense of power.
And so it should. Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgenders have not "outgrown" the need to assert themselves politically; the right wing provides proof of this on a daily basis.
That is why resistance to the international trend towards packaging and privatizing the annual marches, parades and rallies is growing - expressed in different forms in various locales.
Gay people are whole people. Dyke marches, now becoming a widespread phenomenon, began in cities such as Boston, where women felt their political concerns were being ignored by the mainstream pride activities.
Equally alienating are the all-too-common practices of charging groups to participate in parades and collecting gate fees to enter the festivals and beer gardens that follow - excluding teenage and low-income queers from their own "pride" events!
Outrage is building in Portland, Oregon, where Pride organizers have been peppered with complaints after they invited Coors Beer, whose owners bankroll numerous far-right and anti-gay causes, to be corporate sponsors of Pride Day - and then banned the distribution of political material at the event!
On the other side of the world, in Melbourne, Australia, a similar battle is occurring. At this year's event, Pride Board organizers banned the vending of anything but "official" Pride products, thus outlawing the sale of radical and other literature.
Organizers also harassed the legions of supporters of Aboriginal land rights who wanted to march wearing their "Stick with Wik" armbands. The board said they were committed to a non-political march focusing on sexual identity only - leaving Aboriginal queers with the choice to leave half of their identities at home, or not attend at all. There is now an upsurge of protest from the Melbourne community to open next year's event to everybody. Without political content, "People see it as an entertainment and are not going because it's boring," said Barry Taylor, acting president of Melbourne's queer ALSO Foundation.
Pride with a point. Seattle is one of the few large cities where Pride has retained its grassroots flavor, attracting a diverse crowd of all ages, colors, and genders. There, the community-based Freedom Day Committee has successfully fought off several hostile takeover attempts by gay venture capitalists who want to jettison politics in order to attract corporate sponsors and turn Pride Day into a profit-driven enterprise.
The Freedom Day Committee, in which gay businesses, social clubs, and socialists work together, has a successful 15-year tradition of combining celebration and protest, parade and march.
The committee has earned not only the queer community's loyalty, but the respect of leaders of the African American, Chicano/a, labor and other movements for consistently serving as a unifying force to resist rightwing attacks. This year's theme highlights both legalization of same-sex marriage and defense of affirmative action.
The fights over Pride Day reflect a broader division among queers about the fundamental direction of the community. Bureaucrat types and careerists with dollar signs in their eyes want sexual minorities to stick to a pious "straighter-than-thou" agenda to seek "acceptance." Gay liberationists, on the other hand, want to build a movement to win complete freedom and justice for queers - and for everyone else.
Gay Pride is inherently political. It was created by people who knew that the system needs a good shaking up, and that basic fact hasn't changed. Let's keep fighting for Gay Pride Day to be not boring, repressed, and stage-managed from on high, but instead inclusive, democratic, outrageous - and positively revolutionary.
Jordana Sardo is a lesbian activist and founder of Bigot Busters in Portland, Oregon. She works at a shelter for homeless youth.
Return to Index page for this issue
Return to Freedom Socialist newspaper main page
Return to FSP homepage.
