Art N Shit

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And if you haven’t been, the Orlando pride event, at least recently, has become very??? Idk companies dominated, like a shit ton of companies having booths and passing out stuff with their logo in rainbow colors (including health insurance companies, which is Wild.)

So something I tried to ask everyone I interviewed was what they thought about how the pride event is so overrun by companies, and something I found super interesting was the generational divide in the answers? Bc a lot of younger queers were basically like “It’s fucking stupid, it’s a bunch of companies that don’t actually care about us and that we know don’t care about us taking a time that’s supposed to be a celebration of the queer community and instead turning it into a glorified advertising fest.” But a lot of the older people I talked to (there was one couple I talked to that was literally a part of Orlando’s very first Pride parade) talked about how like, they grew up in a time where society either pretended they didn’t exist or reviled them, like literally celebrating people dying from AIDs level of hatred. And so obviously, they were more likely to be like “Oh we love seeing all of the big booths and how many companies are here, etc”.

But idk what was cool was that it wasn’t a situation where the older individuals were like “Yeah, we’re so happy that the companies love us!” Like, they were just as aware that for basically the rest of the year, these companies don’t give a fuck about them. But it was more that the presence of the companies was this huge visual sign of how much things have changed in their lifetime. Like for them, the fact that companies felt like they should go to Pride events, and that putting rainbows and “Love is love” on everything would boost sales, was a reminder that they were excepted and even held power in ways that they literally couldn’t have imagined when they were young. And honestly they were happy that younger generations didn’t have this same view, that they were a lot more cynical and unhappy with the companies in their Pride, because it was a sign of how much better things had gotten for newer generations of the queer community? Like they didn’t have to compare everything to an impossibly low standard, they didn’t look at the world as it is today and feel fortunate just to be alive and be able to be with the person they love; they were able to look at the world and say “You know what, fuck this, we deserve better”.