Notes on Pride

"Pride" is such a sort of confusing notion.  It's a concept that really sends out some mixed signals.  "Pride goeth before a fall!" of course is an old chestnut (or gem; depending on how you look at it).  This phrase is certainly an admonishment.  PRIDE is one of the seven deadly sins.  Pride is a literary theme that usually plays out with the protagonist suffering some kind of misery. So is there a difference between the concept of "Pride" and the feeling of being proud?  This has always confused me.  Nowadays, we actually have a month for Pride.  June.  Gay Pride Month.  If you had told me thirty years ago that the world would be supporting a month dedicated to the celebration of gay and lesbian people (back then we didn't have all the extra letters and symbols (and bisexuality was viewed as a kind of fence sitting): L-G-B-T-Q...I've lost track of what else I'm supposed to attach) I would have scoffed.  Minimum of 50 years (from 1985) I would've offered.  That's how marginalized we felt back then.  Gay marriage?  Well, that was simply never going to happen in my lifetime.  Of course I (all of us) were wrong.

So, yeah, the concept of Pride is at once contradictory.  It's both an ultimate sin and a triumph of the spirit.  Here's me at a gay pride parade in Boston, circa 1991:

Two of my best friends had moved to Los Angeles.  My other good friend wasn't really into gay pride parades.  So I travelled into the city by myself.  I was twenty-five when this picture was taken.  It kind of amazes me that I left the house in that outfit.  I was still sort of in the closet with my family.  I think the look I was going for was maybe...Castro '74?  I'm wearing Ray-Ban aviators (which I lost at a car wash later when I moved to Los Angeles).  The cut-off denim shorts really should have had shredded hems; but I was something of a neat freak at the time and wanted a clean-edged finish.  The t-shirt bares the image of Nathaniel Hawthorne (a shirt I had custom made.  What can I say?  I was really into Hawthorne!)  Looking back on this, I now see the irony.  Hawthorne wrote a lot about the sin of Pride.  Was I making some subconscious association by picking that shirt to wear to a parade that was all about propagating male-pulchritude?  It's interesting.  I had no idea this picture was being taken of me.  It's shot from a parade float by a person I didn't know.  I came into the possession of the photo many, many years later by the fellow that had taken it.  "I always had a crush on you..." he told me when he gave me a copy of the picture (he had tracked me down at some workplace).  I thanked him.  But I had no idea.  Zero idea that this guy fancied me.  That he noticed me in the crowd and had the wherewithal to snap a pic.  Isn't life weird that way?  What if this guy had expressed his love for me when he felt it?  Would my life have gone down a different path?  During this same time period, here's a fellow I had a crush on:

His name was Matt.  I worked with him at a video store on Mass Ave. in Cambridge.  He was gay.  I nearly broke my face flirting with him but he wasn't interested.  He had a type: skinny, blonde boys.  I simply didn't fall into any of the circles of his romantic Venn diagram.  He was also hard of hearing.  He wore hearing aids in both ears and if he got mad at someone and couldn't deal with them; he pointedly turned them off.  But maybe he did like me a little.  I notice right now that the image on his shirt bears a remarkable resemblance to my family crest. What if all that time he had subconsciously held a torch for me and hadn't realized it?  Yes, life gets weirder and weirder!  I wonder what Matt is up to today.

When I first started going to Gay Pride celebrations back in the mid to late 80's, the parade would start in downtown Boston (with "Dykes on Bikes" leading the procession), near the Common, wend around the city for quite a ways; and then end up back at the Common for the celebration (stage, speeches, booths etc.) and then everyone would wind up at the Chandler Street block party next to a bar called "Fritz."  There was day drinking!  There was dancing in the streets!  There was an even more intensified S and M vibe: as in "Stand and Model."  It was summer and it was daylight.  A large percentage of the men were more interested in flaunting their gym pumped bods and perfect pusses then they were in meeting new people.  This was a drawback of the gay male lifestyle that was always a bummer for me.  Being more beautiful and bodacious then the next person was always, it seemed, the goal.  But there was always someone more beautiful and bodacious down the line.  You couldn't win.  Talk abut prideful.  That picture of me is of a very lonely person in a crowd of thousands.  I bought into that world and simply couldn't compete.  It drove me to the verge of something.  Thank God I moved and became preoccupied with making my way in the world.  I didn't have time for that misplaced thinking anymore.  Today, I'm completely over it.  But the gay world of the 80's doesn't exist anymore.

Now, if you can even find a gay bar it's going to be nearly empty.  The few people that are there are probably going to be staring into phones.  Yes, you used to have to actually go out to where other people like you were and force yourself to interact with them.  Eye to eye and through a process known as communication.  It taught you how to socialize.  And it was exciting, meeting people in the flesh without already having a preordained goal.  Grinder and other hook-up sites have really pretty much killed gay life as many of us knew it.  And miss.  I can't think that today's process is better.  It's two steps removed.  It's somehow made anonymous hookups not just anonymous but non-interactive.  "Hotel room door open.  Lights off.  Head down, ass up and ready.  Do your business and go."  This is an actual thing now.  It's called a "Hotel Pump and Dump."  Not to be gross (although it's pretty gross); it's the Arby's drive-through of hook-ups.  I don't get it.  At least we got to have a beer and dance if we were having trouble getting laid.
But back to Pride.  Around the mid 90's, corporations started wising up, realizing there were a lot of gay people on the planet and they were just as voracious of consumers as straight people.  "Gay dollars are just as green" was a phrase I recall hearing at the time.  And then this started happening:

Once the corporations started "underwriting" gay pride events; in a way, it was all over.  The Gay Liberation Movement had officially achieved acceptance from the Establishment.  There wasn't a lot to rage against anymore.  In 1985 the gay pride parade marched through the Establishment's neighborhoods; forcing them to see that gay people existed and they weren't going to take it lying down anymore (so to speak).  When I moved back to Boston from Los Angeles in 1998, I went to the Boston gay pride celebration that June.  The parade route had been changed.  It now marched through the South End.  The South End was the gay neighborhood.  "Well," I thought, "this is preaching to the choir..."  The corporate logos were everywhere; but it seemed to me as if they were saying: "Yeah, we get it--you're gay.  Drink Coca-Cola."  It reeked of opportunism to me.  AIDS was still killing people in 1998 but everyone was so tired by that point that it was like, yeah, I'll have a Coke and smile instead of AZT.  There were people who were still fighting the good fight, though. People like Matt, who was a member of ACT-UP.

It was Matt and all the people like him who showed up at pride parades that have the most to be truly "proud" of. I recall a lot of looking down the nose at those folks.  A lot of "they're wrecking the party" vibes.  But if it wasn't for ACT-UP a lot more people would've died.

I think "Pride" is the wrong word for the Gay Liberation Movement.  I mean, what's there to be proud of if you're gay?  You're born that way.  It just is.  It makes about as much sense as Straight Pride.  Or Mineral Pride.  Or Vegetable Pride.
I think what the Gay Liberation Movement is really about; has always been about; is acceptance.  It's about getting the prejudiced world at large to accept us, yes.  But more importantly it's about accepting ourselves.  Growing up gay in the 1970's was tough.  Being queer, a sissy, a mama's boy, a pansy, a faggot; anything else you wanted to call it...  It was simply one of the worst things in the world you could be.  The shame that engendered I still deal with.  I'm still, in a way, accepting myself.  However, Gay Acceptance Month doesn't have the same ring.  So, I'll guess I'll have to live with Gay Pride.
Ever hear of Paul Cadmus?  He was a painter known for his provocative scenes of carousing, sensuous (and somewhat grotesque) men and women:

Cadmus was queer and super ahead of his time.  He was kind of the Tom of Finland of America. He did little to hide the gayness in his work.  I mean, how many phallic symbols can you count in the above work (Coney Island)?  Cadmus painted a series of paintings called The Seven Deadly Sins which includes "Pride," of course.  I won't post it here; it's simply too creepy to look at for very long; but I encourage you to look it up.  It's interesting that in a gay man's interpretation of Pride he presents a figure that has a micro-penis.  I don't know exactly what that means; but I think it means something.
In 2019 I happened to be in NYC for the weekend.  I wasn't even thinking that it was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.  So it was kind of startling to see that the entire city was decked out in rainbow colors.  Macy's even had a rainbow tunnel.  I have a picture of me in it somewhere; but this stock photo will have to do for now:

I wish I had planned a little better.  I wouldn't have had to run through the NYC Public Library's (another place I'd never visited) really cool exhibition about gay history in NYC.  It was the Evelyn Speed Gaying Tour 2019.  I've still yet to visit the actual Stonewall Inn.  Now those people have something to be proud of.  They actually put their lives on the line.  They invented Gay Pride, although I don't think they knew it at the time.  But I think those rocks hurled at the police definitely sent the message that you WILL accept us.  I bet Matt would've thrown rocks at the police if he'd been at Stonewall.  I wonder if I would've.  Probably not; but who knows.  Who knows what you're capable of when you're pushed to a breaking point.
Here's a couple more Cadmus paintings.  It seems he too had a type.  Just like Matt.

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But you know, I made it clear to Matt how I felt about him.  I didn't just flirt.  I initiated some decidedly 19th Century romantic overtures.  When I think back on all the boys I've loved before; I made it clear to all of them how I felt about them.  Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.  But I tried.  Now of that, I'm rather proud.