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Pride, In the Name of _____?

ken molnar
may 7, 2009

I don't think I am entirely alone in this when I say: Pride was great, but what was it, really?

Now, before you go get all riled up and email me about the good works all these community groups are doing (which I know they are), just give a listen, read on. I know for a fact that I am not the only one who, year after year, looks forward to going, but in a weird generic "it'll be kinda fun, I guess, but I have to go, don't I?" sort of way. In other words you show up, coffee in hand, meet your friends, take some pics, crack some jokes, wander around a bit, and go drink. Maybe you buy something, maybe you chat up that one hot guy you haven't seen before. But, then ... ?

There's a little bit of an existential blankness there. Maybe it's because we are actually succeeding. Maybe it's because gay marriage is finally doing its domino-line tumble, thanks to the prolonged and dedicated work of people I know like Stan and Joe. (We just got Maine yesterday!) Maybe it's because we are all over the media now: Ellen, Rosie, Melissa, k.d., Elton, Carson, Ryan Seacrest—oops, sorry, not out yet! (Wait, here's a new gay mission: how about some "out" hunky guys. Why do they always have to be scrawny and comedic?)

Anyway, just the other day—bored at work—I happened to look up the history of Newton Arvin. I had heard about this guy, the Smith professor who was busted back in, like, the Pleistocene Era for merely being gay. (Actually, they arrested him under the charge of possessing "pornographic" material, material that—to today's eyes—looks ridiculously chaste, like a life-art model from a drawing class.)

I understand that things were different then, but here was the fact that stopped me in my tracks: Newton Arvin lived for, I think, 37 years in Northampton before being arrested in 1960 and all the while he complained bitterly and often to his friends about how conservative and narrow Northampton was. Northampton.

Well, I guess lots of places were conservative back then—this was years before the hippies and Haight-Ashbury, after all—and I know that since the 60s Northampton has certainly gone through it's decades-long slump, and now its liberal "revival" (although now we are sliding dangerously into the Overly Gentrified Zone ... but that is another story for another day).

But the point is this. Arvin's one small statement made me see the town as if I were wearing strange headachey 3-D glasses: out of one eye the prosecutory past, and out of the other the present-day pride : the parade, the purple balloons, the rainbow flags, the lesbians and go-go boys dancing around on floats, girls holding hands, two men kissing—all out on the street in the bright light of day. No fights, no riots, no police, no hiding, no shame, no blame. The world does not end. Everything is fine. We all seem to get along.

I think the reason I can't feel Pride anymore is because it's like health: you only notice it if something isn't working. Pride then becomes a necessary response to a world that would have you believe that who you are is fundamentally wrong. So when the bullies back off, you tend to put the big sticks away, 'cause you don't need them anymore. (I could really say something here.) But anyway, I wish Newton Arvin could have seen what his "narrow, constricted" town has become. He wouldn't have believed it. All I have to do is think back twenty years to my own isolated time of coming-out to know that America is finally turning a corner. People aren't alone in this anymore. There's so much more positive reflection of gay people and gay issues in the media. Twenty years ago, the only time you ever heard about homosexuals in the news was when it involved a political scandal or AIDS.

The "kids" in their 20s I meet now are already shockingly different than my peers, who came only half a generation before them. Being gay is not the issue with these young'uns: getting a boyfriend is. I guess that's progress. Oh, and by the way, I am still looking for the right guy too. So I guess we have this shared "adversity" in common. Maybe the New Pride will be born out of the idea of being bravely single:

"We're queer! Unpaired! Get used to it!"

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