We All Have Things to Learn

I went to the Portland Pride Festival today. It is my third year in attendance and, as usual, I was accompanied my one of my fruit-flies (female friends who are magnets for gay men). We watched a great parade, ended up holding the flag and marching when it seemed like there weren't enough people, and walked around procuring free stuff. I'm torn between my favorite freebie: the small condom case (condom included) that attaches to your key chain or the carabiner with a measuring tape inside.

A recent Facebook status by one of my friends reminded me that not everyone likes Pride. Indeed, I use to hate the idea of Pride. I thought that it gave people an excuse to act "super gay," that we don't need cordoned-off days or weeks to celebrate different groups (in fact, I still feel that the biggest flaw in celebrating certain demographics allows us to forget them the rest of the year), and that there was little substantive value in Pride. My friend believes that Pride diminishes (or does not celebrate) monogamous, long-term relationships, but rather glorifies partying and ultimately ends up having a negative effect on the perception of gay culture.

I might tend to agree with this perception if I hadn't seen so many gay couples and their children at Pride today. As for the people who are "super gay" (by that, I think he means drag queens and flamboyant individuals), the negative perception of them comes from people who don't understand them or don't want to understand them. For a long time, I didn't understand them. I also didn't understand people of ambiguous gender identity, queer identity (I didn't know anything outside of gay or lesbian until early in my college career), and the rampant discrimination against queer people that takes place on a daily basis. I was just a white kid from suburbia who had grown up going to Catholic school and church his whole life and only new that he gay and very little outside of that. But we're all learning, all the time and I am proud to say that by getting to know the diverse people who attend Pride, I have a better understanding of myself and one of the communities to which I belong.

Pride does some things really well and I want to talk about those:
It brings together people of different religions, races, genders, and socio-economic backgrounds. It reminds us we co-exist along queer people everyday; they work in grocery stores, banks, auto dealerships, hospitals, etc. We are reminded that our sexuality, the most complicated part of an individual, can exist in tandem with a "normal" or "average" person; it undercuts the idea of queerness as deviance. As much as Pride may be a salute to a counterculture, it also illustrates the way in which queerness has become integrated into our culture without assimilating.

Camille Paglia has observed that the rainbow flag with its strict geometric lines does not speak to the broad melange of people who identify as queer in some way. It's true. That is the one thing I would change about Pride; let all the colors blur and blend the way the people at Pride do.