I wish I could really just... succinctly put into words how I feel about a lot of pride “discussions” that happen on tumblr where things that are sexual in nature are brought up.
On one hand, I get, especially when you’re a minor, wanting pride events to be the all-ages events they’ve become in some areas.
...But any discussion I see about that very quickly jumps off the deep-end into talking about how pride, “isn’t for gross dirty kinksters to have a BDSM orgies in the streets,”
and often that gets followed by,
“because it’s obscene/perverse/etc.”
And... really, back in the beginnings of pride, there was a lot of emphasis on that. When pride was started there wasn’t the same focus of trying to present the events as public and palatable, and well. The opposite was more the case. The point was to be over the top “obscene”. It was a reclamation. A middle finger to the face of the oppressors to say, “Yeah, some of us are visibly queer, which you find repulsive. Too fucking bad!”
And I get reminders of this a lot any time pride comes up around my family. There’s always a discussion about how early pride events made my family - my white, educated, middle class, cis, straight, Christian, right-wing conservative family - uncomfortable in a way that they couldn’t ignore. It was shocking to them. It was meant to be shocking to people like them.
And sure, major pride events are rather different from then, and maybe those old pride events were a part of creating the, “I’m ‘tolerant’ of gay lifestyles just not in front of my face,” type narrative that we’ve seen since, but it was about shoving queerness in people’s faces so that it at least had to be acknowledged. “Queerness is only (sometimes) ‘tolerated’ behind closed doors,” isn’t a good public opinion, definitely. But when the starting point was, “queerness is evil,” we have to acknowledge that there was progress made, and we should acknowledge the way that progress was made.
And so, separating pride from those roots, I think, is really is what’s getting to me in a lot of what I’m seeing discussed online right now. Trying to shove that history behind some curtains by using the same language about obscenity that queer people rebelled against in the first place is... hardly the way to go about things if we want to pay any sort of respect to the queer people who got us this far.
...Not to say I think everyone needs to be okay with overt sexuality in front of them at public events that are meant to be all-ages. But like. Trying to paint non-conformist reclamation of queer sexuality that still exists within kink and polyamorous communities that, yes, sometimes is overt (which really does need to be contained to adult-only spaces, but in most cases is, and here I am waffling more so people don’t try to spin what I’m saying to mean something else, like that I think children should be exposed to people fucking in the street or something, because I’ve had shit like that happen before and it was not fun) as being perverse and obscene again is going backwards.
Ugh... basically, the short term goals of wanting a sanitized community to present to our oppressors so that they see us as normal is the exact opposite of how what we’re celebrating even came about. Pride came about specifically to upset “normal”, not to assimilate into it.
