What Has Pride Month Become?
You may have seen in the news that some are calling for more “family-friendly” gay pride events. What exactly is meant by “family-friendly” and why does my community need to accommodate such requests?
Let’s back up a bit and explore some of Pride Month’s events. Across the world, people gather to celebrate the accomplishments of the gay community and press for more acceptance. Pride marches, festivals, parades, you-name-it have created spaces for queer people to share their true selves, and leave behind the facade we typically create to make others feel comfortable.
Where did this month of pride come from? After the Stonewall Inn riots in 1969 in New York City, people around the nation began marching throughout the 1970s. Those marches were much more heated than they are today–what we celebrate now in the 2020s is certainly more of a parade than a march. People came together to march for equality, realizing a severe lack of human rights and challenges only faced by the gay community. These early Pride-goers fought for rights, and not just during the month of June, to increase the civil liberties afforded to the LGBTQIA+ community.
Flash forward to today and, sure, you might see Apple employees walking in the parade with their rainbow Apple-logo tees and children on their shoulders. Your local city council might be waving their rainbow flags from a large parade float. And in more liberal cities, you might even see a biker gang showing their support by riding through town blasting some Lady Gaga. But you also might see leather harnesses, women in nipple tassels, glitter bombs on men who are 5% clothed, drag queens dancing provocatively, things you won’t soon find in the suburb down the road. After years of hard work and dedication to obtaining human rights, why should these people be asked to put their kinks and other oddities away so your child is not exposed?
Then, there is the other end of the gay spectrum that does not necessarily want to parade scantily clad and doused in glitter–this includes me (glitter flares up my OCD like you wouldn’t believe). Many people in the community have fought for their rights to feel comfortable in their locale simply through assimilation. Recently, I have talked to many people of different ages and backgrounds that have sought attendance at Pride events but chose not to out of fear of feeling othered–in the community that is supposed to lift them up and allow them to be who they are. One might even assert fitting “in” in the gay community can be just as difficult as coming out and expressing oneself.
So, should children be exposed to these juxtapositions: the state officials’ float followed by a barge of dancing, half-naked queens? That choice is up to you, the parent. However, no one should be asking queer people to change their behaviors and appearances in spaces they created in the first place to celebrate themselves.
