Responses to my Gay Pride Criticisms Posted by: Dale Franks
on Monday, July 31, 2006
As a matter of passing interest, I note that all of the disagreements to my post on the San Diego Gay Pride Festival sounded as if they were written by people writing off the same sheet of talking points. This comment is typical:
It is obvious that you missed great other parts of the festivities, namely the interfaith pavilion, the Center’s rock climb, and other family centered areas and activities. You have focused solely on the parts that are not "conventional" without even one word on these other areas. This is very typical..let’s focus on the sliver in the eye of our neighbor and forget the beam we have in our own. I suggest you take a walk down any of Florida’s beaches during Spring Break and see how the heterosexual’s play...not much difference to me. The Girls Gone Wild videos speak volumes on that topic alone.
Let's break this down a bit.
It is obvious that you missed great other parts of the festivities...
You are utterly wrong, and I have an entire DVD's worth of pictures to prove it. Including, as it happens, several from the rock climbing tower alone. I walked and took pictures from the entire length and breadth of the celebration.
However, what you seem to be saying is, "Hey, ignore the sex and nudity! We made up for by having a rock tower and an interfaith center!"
The appropriate standard for public behavior is not to ensure that the inappropriate content is balanced out with appropriate spiritual content. It is, rather, to make the sexy bits private, rather than public.
I suggest you take a walk down any of Florida’s beaches during Spring Break and see how the heterosexual’s play...not much difference to me.
This is an unsufferably silly argument.
First, I condemn equally the depraved public behavior at Spring Break. Moreover, as an adult who has passed his fortieth year, I would find it both embarrassing and degrading to justify my behavior as a mature adult by using the behavior of 20 year-old students as the standard of acceptability.
Second, Spring Breakers are not holding officially recognized public events at which families with children are encouraged to attend, and for which they are charged money in order to support their political or cultural aims (of which, I also note, the Spring Breakers have none).
Third, Spring Breakers are not organizing politically to promote tolerance of their behavior, or to obtain other political benefits, thus, they have no interest in convincing others that their high-spiritedness is acceptable.
Fourth, rather than trying to use Spring Break as a recruiting opportunity, thus implying acceptance of the shennaningans, the police generally call out the reserves to catch and arrest people for indecent public behavior, to the extent they are able.
Fifth, since I do not—and did not—attend Spring Break, nor take part in the activities that arise therefrom, I have no "beam" in my eye in regards to this situation that prevents me from criticizing the mote in the eye of the Gay Pride festivities.
Sixth, the existence of unacceptable behavior in the activities of other groups in no way mitigates nor excuses unacceptable public conduct from your group.
Seventh, my criticism, such as it was, was a criticism on the grounds of political tactics. You seem upset to have the obvious pointed out to you, to wit, that if you are attempting to tap into some greater measure of political power in a democratic state, then the rational policy is to soothe, rather than exacerbate, the concerns of the fellow citizens upon which you must depend in order to obtain majoritarian consent to your preferred policies. That is how politics work in the real world, no matter how you imagine them working in the idealized cloud-cuckoo land you apparently prefer to inhabit.
"I’d always thought gays were regular people, just like you and me, and that the stereotype of homosexuals as hedonistic, sex-crazed deviants was just a destructive myth," said mother of four Hannah Jarrett, 41, mortified at the sight of 17 tanned and oiled boys cavorting in jock straps to a throbbing techno beat on a float shaped like an enormous phallus. "Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong."
I think a lot more people think this way than some of the parade sponsors would like to believe. From a purely political analysis, I think these parades do far more damage to the "gay rights movement" than just about anything else.
First. Get a life. As an adult who has passed his fortieth year, I suggest you stay home during the next gay pride parade, and stay out of Balboa Park in general.
Second. Get a life. Stay home next year, and keep your kids inside so they aren’t exposed to potential human body parts you don’t want them to know about.
Third. Get a life. (And learn to punctuate.) Anyone who thinks that a gay pride parade is supposed to be decorous in order to garner adminarion and esteem doesn’t live in this century.
Forth. Get a life. If you’re so very hung up on nudity (related to gay pride or spring break) I would think you would stay away from the "shennaningans" rather than expose yourself to them.
Fifth. Get a life and learn to write. Too many "beams" and "motes" and "therefroms." Do you have something to say?
Sixth. Get a life!
Seventh. If you think the gay parade is a good political tactic for winning acceptance, then you should go back to business school and repeat your marketing curriculum. If you dropped out of business school before you got to that, that may be the reason for your misconceptions. Get a life.
Yeah, what a joke. Let me get this straight. You go to a gay pride festival and complain about their behavior.
Second, Spring Breakers are not holding officially recognized public events at which families with children are encouraged to attend, and for which they are charged money in order to support their political or cultural aims (of which, I also note, the Spring Breakers have none).
And they charge money to get into the festival?
Also during the show, he made a very mild sexual reference, and said something to the effect that, "If you want to see something like that, you’ll have to go and see the event at the other end of the park."
We didn’t know what he was talking about. When we drove to the park, we saw they were setting up some sort of event, but we didn’t know what it was. We were curious, so after our scheduled shoot was over, Chris and I went to see what he was talking about.
Oh .. My .. God.
So. Not only does one have to seek out this festival, one also has to fork over twelve bucks to attend? You might have a legitimate complaint regarding public acceptance if the festival was a parade down the old main drag where children may be there by happenstance. But it wasn’t, so you don’t. If anything, you should be encouraging the fact that they held this festival behind partitions and required fees for entering.
And besides, this is a festival, you square. People attend these events to be festive. And if being festive for these people includes dressing like the fairy godmother and prancing around like Tinkerbell – then so be it… It’s their festival.
I’ve known a few gay people in my time so far, and I’ve never seen this type of behavior that you recorded except at a gay pride event.
Seventh, my criticism, such as it was, was a criticism on the grounds of political tactics. You seem upset to have the obvious pointed out to you, to wit, that if you are attempting to tap into some greater measure of political power in a democratic state, then the rational policy is to soothe, rather than exacerbate, the concerns of the fellow citizens upon which you must depend in order to obtain majoritarian consent to your preferred policies.
I don’t see political activists for gay rights showing up in front of Congress while wearing pasties. I don’t see political activists for gay rights making political ads while dressing up like the fairy godmother. I don’t see political activists for gay rights collecting signatures while showing their ass cheeks.
This was a behind closed doors private event requiring the public – by way of requiring a fee to enter – to consent to the behavior expressed within those confines. It is rare to find an event more libertarian than that. So instead of handing down condescension, you should be praising their respect for those who do not wish to experience. And who cares if they invite families to attend? I’m frequently invited, through adverts and other writs, to events that I choose not to attend.
This is the same old argument that used to take place between the conservative assimilationists of the Mattachine Society and more radical queer activists like the Gay Liberation Front.
History repeats itself.
Queer, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender people should all be fighting for sexual revolution, not the painfully absurd legal avenues that the LGBT movement attempted in the 90s (only to see those meek gains eroded with the Bush regime). If you don’t like nudity, don’t come to our neighborhoods and our events. We are not here to impress heteros or to make them feel accomodated by our polite style of dress.
It is precisely that intolerance for sexual freedom and freedom for our bodies that the queer rights movement has been fighting against.
This is all aside from the fact that San Diego Pride is hardly the bastion of nude radicalism that the original author has made it out to be. The author clearly has never come to visit San Francisco Pride where people are welcomed in any manner of dress in which they wish to attend, even if that amounts to no dress at all. It is a tremendously freeing experience and is perhaps one of the best examples of what a movement can do to truly re-invigorate free expression as per the First Amendment.
To look at an event such as SD Pride that allows people the space to be who they are—to dress in accordance to their own desires—and to see only the supposedly degenerate excesses of public nudity is to miss how far the LGBT movement has come. As I see it, we are making safe spaces for queer people to feel positively about their bodies and desires in a public setting; this is nothing new to the queer rights movement. The author would be wise to review some of this history because the very rights we all now enjoy have come on the backs of radical trannies, gay street hustlers, drag queens, hardcore dykes, and other sexual ’riff-raff’ who were at the riots at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francicso in 1966 and at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in 1969.
Rather than being negative about nudity, I applaud the nude folk who came to stretch the narrow minds and cultural boundaries like that of the author’s.
So to the author I say, Get out of our movement. Just go away. We don’t need hetero-conforming conservative body fascists now any more than we did in the 60s, 70s or 80s. We have done just fine without your reinscription of heteronormative sexual standards.
Go hide your genitals on your own time, we have a revolution to build.
