Pride’s fun. It’s great fun. It’s half-naked, sweaty, glittery, muscular, sexy, close-packed, rainbow-colored, beer-drinking, house-dancing, all-wrapped-in-a-feather-boa fun. A certain silly stereotype holds that the gays really know how to throw a party; Pride seems to stare levelly at that stereotype, cock a wry eyebrow, and inform the straight world with dry assuredness that it doesn’t know the half of it.[5]
Temperamentally, I’m sort of neurotic and restrained – things like crowds, socializing, and dancing make me anxious – and so I tend to end up watching libidinal, visceral fun from a slight psychic, perhaps critical, distance—which, depending on your point of view, either makes me especially qualified or fantastically unqualified to write about it. From my perspective, it seems that Pride’s fun isn’t just present and intense but also – and this seems important – non-trivial.
This is to say that it’s fun performed with serious motives and to serious effect. Everything that queer people have to keep in their pants for most of the year – literally and figuratively – explodes out into the open. Before and underneath politics and history, homosexuality is sexuality; since increased tolerance for gay people has not tended to mean increased tolerance for gay sex – for the slightly icky, sometimes awkward, and often very inventive realities that fucking entails – wading bare-chested into a crowd and performing the appropriate mating rituals publicly and unashamedly is neither a small nor an apolitical feat.
In fact, the general nakedness isn’t just titillating. It also rings symbolic. By at least the 1972 publication of Esther Newton’s Mother Camp, Chicago drag queens were observing that everything is drag: That dressing as a businessman or a father figure or a politician differs only in degrees from dressing as a woman. “Gay people know that sex-typed behavior can be achieved, contrary to what is popularly believed. They know that the possession of one type of genital equipment by no means guarantees the ‘naturally appropriate’ behavior.”[6] It’s nearly impossible to guess how most of the people at Pride present themselves in their day-to-day lives, because nearly everyone has either taken as many of the usual signifiers off his body as possible or, in the obvious cases of the drag queens and the leather daddies, donned an entirely new set that feels more authentic or just more fun. It strikes a small blow, this kind of thing, but a significant one.
And it’s possible that “fun” is a totally satisfying answer to the question of what goes on at Pride; it’s possible that what Pride produces and reproduces is an opportunity for unabashed fun, straightforward celebration of a marginalized sexuality and identity that usually can’t be openly celebrated. It’s also possible that stripping off signifiers and enjoying the presence and possibility of sex is not just an unintentionally political act, but the unintentionally political act that the gay-rights movement has been politically fighting for since its inception: complete, unrestricted, unburdened, unmeaning freedom—freedom that doesn’t necessarily need to intend.
It’s possible but not likely. On an abstract level, freedom of this sort starts very quickly to look like self-negation. Sexuality is before and underneath politics, history, and identity; but it isn’t politics, history, or identity. These are more complicated parts of what makes up a person, and parts that are more literally meaningful, as in full of meaning. So freedom to not-mean, to not-intend, to be un-signified, ends up undermining those other, more heavy parts of personhood, which do have a tendency to be burdens or at least inconveniences. It’s not impossible to aim away from them, to think of sexuality as just another inchoate biological drive, an itch like hunger or thirst that everyone wants to scratch, some in different ways than others. That can’t simultaneously be the telos of the movement and the underlying reason for the celebration. One doesn’t eliminate something, viz. gay identity, by throwing a party for it; nor, presumably, does one go to a party for something with the intention of undermining it.
But there’s also a very practical problem with the Pride-as-fun thesis: namely, that Pride’s fun has an unpleasant undertaste. Try to imagine the tableau. On one side, thirty-three politicians scattered or clustered in anxious little groups among 175 very large and very powerful corporations, along with a handful of local, gay-owned businesses and maybe fifty organizations whose stated purpose is to support and represent a gay community. On the other, 450,000 individuals whose sexual tastes ostensibly make them a part of that community. The floats are gorgeous, towering, sparkling things of crêpe and beauty, stunning examples of camp’s good taste in bad taste, vibrating with glitter and a deep throbbing bass that shakes and echoes somewhere animal and preconscious. They summon something from within each spectator, they draw out something that’s glad of the opportunity to be freed and moving and unencumbered, something basic that responds with joy to having been let loose.
And id or essence, whatever that something is, it comes out and hits—a Starbucks logo. A can of Miller Light. If it’s lucky, a favorite neighborhood bar or a sex-friendly toy store. Which isn’t even the worst of it, the sense of betrayal and, I think, self-defensive fight-or-flight fear that comes with being evoked and then sold-at. The worst of it seems to be what’s occurring on the other side of the tableau, the people side.
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[5] It doesn’t.
[6] Esther Newton, Mother Camp, 2d. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 103.
