25 June, 2019

Happy Pride, y’all.

It is, after all, still Pride Month. Pride Month, which is like Truck Month but for The Queers™, though, unlike Truck Month, Pride Month lasts only 30 days, and is far less in your face about its arrival than Truck Month, and while Truck Month is for everyone, Pride Month is just for us.

Pride. Thirty days to remind the world that Queer People ~~Love Glitter~~ Exist; to share in our collective experience of queerness and celebrate it; to blast Cakes da Killa and Carly Rae Jepsen as we absolutely murder every hallway and stretch of sidewalk with a strut, with a thousand-yard fuck me/don’t fuck with me glare, with a proclamation to Work. Slay. Show out. Come through.

But also…

Pride. Thirty days to feel both a part of and apart from our community. Because aside from the shared oppression, we’re not really all that similar, and my queer experience almost certainly isn’t yours (yes, Dear Reader, thank you— I know we both sucked Jason’s dick in the Cheer Ups bathroom. That’s not really the experience I’m talking about), and while sometimes I feel union and communion with all the other Queers in the Kindom, I also often feel… alienated isn’t the word I want. I want a word that describes how I feel around straight people but without the anxiety that comes from being around straight people— disconnected, maybe. Yeah, disconnected.

Well, disconnected and horny.

And as much as Pride makes me (cough) proud of who I am, it also always makes me self-conscious. Because although being queer isn’t exclusively sexual, it is intrinsically sexual, since being queer is very much related to who and how we fuck, and we fuck (often) with our bodies, so badda bing, badda boom, I’m getting ready for the parade and why have all of my clothes shrunk and when did my head get so oblong and have my eyes always been this close together and, oh good, we’re all getting naked in the pool afterwards, fantastic, what a time for a break out, what a time for an ingrown butthair, what a time for all the weird ways I feel about my body, What A Time For Pride.

Ah, Pride.

I’m proud that we, as a community, have created spaces for exploring our bodies and engaging our desires, no matter how weird or specific or difficult they may be. I’m proud of the Fisters, the Pissers, the Cumpigs, the Pups, &c.; and I’m happy we can embrace the open, the closed, the collared, the thruples, et al. I just wish we were as good at communicating our emotional boundaries and insecurities as we are at communicating rim job? to a ~~stranger~~ new friend in the bathroom of a bus stop— maybe this Pride you’ll let me open your heart, bro; maybe this time you can gape my soul.

And I’m proud of the iconography we’ve created, from big public flags to the small private hankies, but I am not proud of the identities we’ve erased to get here, and I do not understand how my slice of the community can continue to be so superficial and centered on whiteness and maleness and normativity— the mean guy you wanted to fuck in high school shouldn’t be a role model, but there he is— masculine, and detached, and reckless, and toxic. And I hate that guy, and I’m scared of that guy, and I don’t even want to fuck that guy, but the pool party is next weekend and if only I looked like that guy, I’d be okay, I’d be confident, I’d be proud. —
Gross. Fuck that guy. (okay, maybe I’d fuck that guy.)

Pride. Thirty days. This month is ours because we took it, and I will continue to make my self known, because Pride gives me strength. This month is ours because we resisted, we persisted, we insisted; this month is ours because people like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and Harry Hay fought for it, and— wait, what? Harry Hay was a NAMBLA supporter? Eeehhh…. fuck. I don’t know what to do with that.

Pride?

Being queer is a (cough) rainbow of emotions, that’s for sure. Our community makes me feel unity and togetherness and joy and hope, and it’s okay that I also feel disconnected and regretful and frustrated and tired and on and on, because family is a complex thing and — sing it with me — we are family.

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