Antidote, Pride Edition

This story has, as they say, gone viral.

This Oklahoma man is showing that ‘not all country boys are bigots’ with the Pride flag on his pickup truck pic.twitter.com/E56tscNkfU

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) June 24, 2019

I don't think I need to add anything.

Random Observations: Pride Month in Chicago

It may seem odd to some that Chicago is very gay friendly, given the history, but that's past. As for the present:

Riding the bus down on Clark or Broadway, when you get to the historic Boys' Town (East Lakeview), there are rainbow banners and flags on the light post, which actually extend north of that on Broadway into Uptown, with rainbow banners that read "Uptown Proud". On Halsted, at least at the north end, trans banners alternative with the rainbows.

Even the CTA has joined in -- there are rainbow el trains and, I believe, buses (although I haven't seen one of the latter).

There are also rainbows in various guises in shop windows -- including J. C. Licht, a paint and supply store.

And there are occasional rainbows in shop windows down into Lincoln Park.

Strangely enough, there is no official notice of Pride in Andersonville, the other gay neighborhood, although some of the businesses are flying the rainbow.

And the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium are flying rainbow flags; the member sticker at the Field, rather than the usual blue, have a rainbow ground.

And of course, there will be the Parade, which in recent years has started in Uptown; rather than beginning at Halsted and Belmont, it now kicks off at Montrose and Broadway, which is quite a bit farther north. (We're everywhere.)

And that's the visible signs of Pride Month in Chicago.

I Survived Pride

It didn't take much doing -- I skipped the Parade: I'm not one for crowds at the best of times, and I'm still recovering from the attack of whatever attacked me last weekend, so I just went to the Park and read for a while. Because of geography (read: bus reroutes around the Parade and the resultant chaotic traffic), it took me two hours to get there and three hours to get home. It normally takes about 45 minutes.

So, after a day of kids wearing rainbows and being out and proud, I get up this morning to check the news and it's back to Donald Trump being a genocidal asshole who wants to repeal the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment.

I'd rather have rainbows.

I Didn't See That Coming

I don't think of the Field Museum of Natural History as a supporter of gay rights. I don't think of it as being anti-gay, just non-political. However, I think I mentioned that the member stickers you get when you check in are printed in a rainbow instead of the usual dark blue for this month. I also noticed, on my last trip, that they're flying a rainbow flag on the north side of the building. And it so happens that they're taking their show to Boys' Town, with a special event at Sidetracks, one of the more popular bars on the strip, hosted by the Museum's LGBTQ affinity group, Outfielders.

Who knew?

Seen From the Bus

There are still remnants of Pride around -- the rainbow flag is still flying on the Parade route and in the neighborhood in general, and a lot of businesses still have them up. One gesture of support that needs to be acknowledged:

This place is down on Clark at Wrightwood, and serves one of the two best cheeseburgers in town.

Given the resounding silence of the Trump White House on Pride Month ("Great Outdoors Month"? What, "Shoot an endangered species near you"?), I thought this was worthy of note:

Huge Fat Loser
June 25 at 6:45am

I'll be out there working at Pridefest today wearing this shirt under my uniform for a lot of reasons.
For my step brother.
For my priest.
For my aunts who died before they could be legally married.
For my cousin.
For all of the cops I have worked with over the years, including one of the best partner's I've ever shared a sector car with.
For my classmate in High School who's parents made him sleep in a tent in his yard.
For the man who cried on my shoulder about losing his partner on 9/11.
For every call I went to where someone got kicked out of their house or who's family just didn't understand.
For anyone who's had to hide who they are.
I've got your back.
Love is Love.
#loveislove #pride #pride🌈 #prideparade #nypd #igotyou #freehugs

He's a cop in New York.

Via Joe.My.God.

Oops -- Happy Belated Pride Day

Yesterday was Chicago's Pride Parade, and by all reports, it was, as usual, a huge success. (And I mean "huge," and not in the Trump sense: over the past several years, Pride has drawn a million people, making it one of the largest in the world.) And, as expected, the predicted storms did not happen: in 47 years, it has never rained on Chicago's Parade. (There have been years when the morning started with downpours, but the skies always clear up by the time the Parade starts.)

And the date this year was especially significant: on June, 26, 2003, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Lawrence vs. Texas, voiding all sodomy laws; on June 26, 2013, the Court found Section 3 of DOMA unconstitutional, thanks to Edie Windsor; and on June 26, 2015, the Court found, in Obergefell v. Snyder, that same-sex couples have the same right to marry the person of their choice as anyone else.

As for me, I'm past the point where standing in 90 degree heat with a million of my closest friends for several hours to watch a parade is appealing. I went downtown and tried to work on other things, which is another story.

Images of the Week: Chicago Pride, 2015

From Bernice:

This is how Chicago's police respond to Pride (unlike, say, Istanbul):

And for the bible-thumpers:

Did I hear someone say "Flamboyant"?:

I had actually intended to stop by the Parade for the first time in years. It was a beautiful sunny day, not too hot, and this year is pretty special. Thanks to the CTA, I spent most of the late morning and afternoon waiting for or sitting on a bus. The Parade pretty much turns traffic on the North Side east of Ashland into a total nightmare -- worse than a Cubs game; add in that Devon Avenue, which is where I catch two of my three available buses, was closed due to construction at the east end, and the CTA, in its infinite wisdom had neglected to post a notice at the bus stop informing (potential) riders where they could catch the bus. It gets better: Devon was supposed to be open to westbound traffic. It wasn't. So the bus I took home had to do an ad hoc reroute, because CTA hadn't informed the drivers that the road was closed. So those few remaining riders gathered at the front to advise the driver on the best route to take to her terminal.

Between traffic and reroutes, it took nearly two hours to get home; then, of course, it started raining just before I had to get off the bus -- just heavily enough to be a pain in the ass.

I did, however, see a lot of kids wearing rainbows and a lot of high spirits.

It's Pride Month

And in honor of that, read this post by Joe Jervis at Joe.My.God. I think the ending resonates most with me (but all of it's true):

I'm proud because I'm a middle-aged gay man who has more dead friends than living ones and yet I'm not completely insane. I've lived through a personal Holocaust (here we go again) in which my friends and lovers have been mowed down as thoroughly and randomly as the S.S guards moved down the line of Jews. You, dead. You, to the factory. And you, you, you, and you, dead. I am inexplicably alive and I am proud that I keep the memories of my friends alive. I am proud of my people, the ACT UPers, the Quilt makers, the Larry Kramers, the Harvey Fiersteins. I'm proud that I'm not constantly curled up into a ball on my bed, clutching photo albums and sobbing. And that happens sometimes, believe it.

And outside of my personal experiences, I am proud of my tribe as a group. Sometimes I think that gay people are more creative, more empathic, more intuitive, more generous, and more selfless than anybody else on the planet. Sometimes I think that if an alien culture were surveying our planet from light years away, they might classify gay people as an entirely separate species of humans. It's easy to spot us because of our better haircuts.

But sometimes I think we are the worst people in the entire world when it comes to standing up for each other. The gay people who'd like to soothe their personal image problems by selectively culling some of our children from Pride events? They disgust me. They appall me. They embarrass me. To them I say: The very road that YOU now have the privilege of swaggering upon was paved by those queens and leather freaks that you complain about as you practice your "masculine" and give us butch face. If you want to live in the house that THEY BUILT, you better act like you fucking know it. United we stand, you snide bitches. America's kulturkampf ain't gonna be solved by making flamboyant people go away.

I'll end this by making one final Jewish reference. Possibly you've heard the Jewish in-joke that sums up the meaning of all Jewish holidays? "They tried to kill us. We won. Let's eat." My Pride version?

They wish we were invisible.

We're not.

Let's dance.

The Leftist Backlash

I ran across a couple of posts the other morning that brought me back to an issue that, in my humble opinion, is significant for the progress of acceptance of gay people by the larger society. Both reek of the New Left of the 80s.

This one, an opinion piece by someone named Topher Gen at Pink News, I have trouble taking seriously.

And that’s what Pride does; it fuels the flames of hate. Today, Pride is little more than a giant excuse for corporate marketing and a bit of drunken fun. The march claims to ‘celebrate’ its participants’ sexuality, but it’s to its community’s own detriment.

Click through and read the whole thing, if you like -- unfortunately, it doesn't get any more coherent, and Topher Gen seems to be one of those wild-eyed zealots who is going to show us The Way -- his way, which is the only way.

This one is pernicious. This is where the old New Left (your struggle is everyone's struggle, but everyone else comes first) has wound up. The whole cast of this one is negative, marked by a determination to take every aspect of Pride in the worst possible light.

Pride initially represented the cry, “We exist!” shouted from an ignored and stigmatized community to the larger population of the country. It was a celebration of the margins. While this is still the case in some ways, the LGBTQ community has now found itself underwritten by the most oppressive elements of American society—banks, politicians, and corporations, the ultimate ostracizers—and it has largely accepted this. It is a shift almost as dizzying in scope as the shift in mainstream consciousness towards LGBTQ rights. Decades ago, from the margins came a movement, one which has now, years later, unfortunately and almost unblinkingly accepted the subsidy of organizations and individuals that actively enable the perpetual, repressive “othering” of the powerless.

I think we can rather take this funding by major corporations as an indication of how far we've come in gaining acceptance in society at large. To be realistic about it, they're doing it because it's good business. Think about the implications of that for a minute or two. There's also the fact that Pride is not about the 99%. That's not the point. (You're going to see this point made again and again here.)

Speaking of imperialism, even while some supporters cheer Obama for his support of marriage equality in North Carolina—“a day after it could have done some good,” Occupy Chicago organizer James Cox reminded me—I think of the words of Mike Knish: “For every one of us cheering Obama’s entry into the 21st century, there is a pile of dead Afghani kids who don’t give a shit”

WTF? "Speaking of imperialism"? Well, of course he was speaking about imperialism -- why, Gay Pride is all about the fight against imperialism. Just ask any leftist with a high score on the purity index. This reminds me so much of the political speeches after Pride parades in the 80s by the likes of Urvashi Vaid that I'm really wondering if this guy is in a time warp of some sort.

No, Gay Pride is not about Afghanistan.

And what about [Bradley] Manning? The now-famous (increasingly so) whistleblower who allegedly disclosed evidence of US war crimes was honored in the parade with a float from Chicago activist Andy Thayer’s Gay Liberation Network (GLN), which featured a healthy Occupy Chicago contingent among a group of roughly 35. Tunes from a previous anti-war movement—Edwin Starr, John Lennon, and Marvin Gaye—backed the group, which sought to bring political consciousness to an event that seemed, as Cox noted, “more about having fun than trying to achieve any right.” This is to be praised. The problem comes, then, in the GLN’s full and unqualified acceptance of Private Manning as a gay man and not, as is definitely possible, a transgender woman.

OK -- Bradley Manning was honored with a float, but it's a bad thing because it didn't identify Manning as a transgender woman, because he might be.

Do I really have to comment on that?

That's the bulk of it. There are actually comments thanking this idiot for this post, on the order of "the fight for gay rights is the fight for everyone's rights" -- notable because the point is not that everyone should be fighting for our rights, but that we're supposed to be fighting for everyone else's. To be fair, there are also comments pointing out other of the huge flaws in the author's reasoning, and the poster under whose auspices this went up, Kit O'Connell, left a comment that does display the sense of proportion that I find so lacking in the post itself.

The point of this is that these commentaries display the lack of a sense of proportion that I find as endemic on the left as on the right. They are talking about a specific event, and in effect trying to dictate to the rest of us what our celebration is supposed to be, starting with the baseline, which is that all the elements of their agendas must be included. If you follow this blog at all, you know I don't respond well to authority, particularly if that authority is self-bestowed.

Maybe next year I'll write my own post on Gay Pride -- on what it is, not what I think it should be.

Fortunately,

I'm very fond of Oreos.

And of course, the usual suspects are screaming for a boycott of Kraft. I guess they haven't stopped to think (do they ever?) about what they're going to eat:

The Last Sunday in June

That's Pride Day in Chicago, which means that today's the parade.  Expect around 400,000 along the parade route.

I don't know if I'll go -- I'm sort of over spending the afternoon with nearly half a million of my closest friends, and the forecast is leaning toward rain, which I don't believe -- as nearly as I can remember, even when the day starts off stormy, it has never rained on our parade.

I've watched, I've marched, I've ridden floats, and one thing that strikes me every year:  Chicago's Pride Parade is a family affair.  Seriously -- people bring their kids.  Seniors bring lawn chairs.  Straight couples stand there applauding wildly.

Which brings to mind what has become the perennial complaint from the "we're dying to be co-oped" crowd.  Y'know what?  The reason these people come is not to see a bunch of accountants marching down the street.  They come for the leather folk, the drag queens, the nearly naked dancers, the Dykes on Bikes.  They come for the color and energy.  (And I suspect that some of them are hoping to catch a glimpse of a couple of guys doing something naughty in the alley.  Don't raise your eyebrows -- I remember one year when kilts were in, the high-school kid sitting on the curb clutching his girlfriend and trying to look up my skirt as I walked by.)

So all I'm going to say is to quote Joe Jervis:

They're trying to make us invisible.

We're not.

Let's dance.

It's Pride Week

For those of us in the (insert favorite combination of initials) community, that has a lot of different meanings -- no surprise: we're as homogeneous as any other commmunity, which is to say, not.

I may have something to say about this later in the week, but I'm still feeling my way back into writing. To hold you over, I've discovered a couple of posts I think are worth looking at.

First, from Waymon Hudson at Bilerico, some comments on "Putting the Politics Back in Pride".

Over the years, Pride celebrations have shifted from their earlier protest march forms to more celebratory parties as LGBT people have felt safer, come out of the closet, and been more visible in society. Yet even as our parties grew larger, our legal rights and battles for equality have stalled, with major pieces of pro-LGBT legislation languishing in congress. That's why this year is the perfect time to take pride back to it's roots and put the politics and protest back in.

And Joe Jervis has a potent rejoinder to those who want our parades to be like the VFW or something.

But sometimes I think we are the worst people in the entire world when it comes to standing up for each other. The gay people who'd like to soothe their personal image problems by selectively culling some of our children from Pride events? They disgust me. They appall me. They embarrass me. To them I say: The very road that YOU now have the privilege of swaggering upon was paved by those very queens and leather freaks that you complain about as you practice your "masculine" and give us butch face. If you want to live in the house that THEY BUILT, you better act like you fucking know it. United we stand, you snide bitches. America's kulturkampf ain't gonna be solved by making flamboyant people go away.

I'll end this by making one final Jewish reference. Possibly you've heard the Jewish in-joke that sums up the meaning of all Jewish holidays? "They tried to kill us. We won. Let's eat." My Pride version?

They wish we were invisible.

We're not.

Let's dance.

This is the point I've been trying to make for years, but Jervis did it up right. Read it.

I know, I know. . .

I haven't posted in a couple of days. Chalk it up to the most annoying week in the history of Western civilization -- I finally just pooped out. I managed not to finish a single writing project yesterday, although I started several.

It was that kind of day.

However, I ran across something in passing at Pam's House Blend that made me think a bit. It's a post by The Author on those pre-medieval minds at Manifest Glory Ministries who tried to exorcise "the homosexual demons" from a sixteen-year-old boy.

I don't think I really need to comment on that, except to point out that the pastor and congregation appear to be a few centuries behind the rest of the world. (By the way, the boy, according to the blogosphere, is now attending an LGBT-affirming church.)

This comment made me stop:

I'm not even going to answer that silliness except for to say that not all gay pride parades are the same. Down here in South Carolina, our events are extremely family-friendly.

I'm not sure what that means. I was on a float a couple of years running, and there are lots of families in the audience here in Chicago. Most of them are straight. And all of them are cheering, the leatherfolk and dancers no less than the politicians. (Actually, for the dancers, probably more.) I suspect that "family friendly" doesn't mean the same thing in Chicago that it does on South Carolina. In fact, I'm sure of it.

I've commented on Pride Parades and their context before (here and here), but just want to restate it once again for those who have internalized their closets: It's our parade. It's not James Dobson's parade, it's not Barack Obama's parade, it's not Middle America's parade. It's our parade, with all the color, vitality, and in-your-face outrageousness that are the gay community. If it bothers you, stay home.

And, come to think of it, today is Parade day in Chicago. I'm probably not going to go -- those pesky writing projects, which do need to be finished tout suite. And I'm not really in the mood, although if I didn't have to work tomorrow I might be tempted to go out and tie one on. After this week, that might be the best course.

But no. I'm going to be responsible.

I hate myself sometimes.