To quote Lisa Simpson, "this is why I can't have nice things."
It only takes a few people to fuck up a good thing for everyone else, and when a fringe group of faux queer activists hijacked Philly Pride, they did exactly that. Many of us bemoaned Rainbow Capitalism and how corporate Pride festivals around the world had become. It was true. Bank of America shouldn't be able to price Cape May Mosaics out of a booth. But with greater acceptance over the past decades, Pride festivals have become ways of introducing our curiously straight counterparts to our community in fun, friendly, and inviting ways. The festivals would have been nicer without T-Mobile kiosks and the Wells Fargo wagon, but those sponsors helped pay for security and services.
Be careful what you wish for. Corporate sponsors aren't just banned from this year's Philly Pride Parade, so is the fun and spectacle.
It's profoundly sad. In a community that still faces harsh marginalization and violence, we're no strangers to conservative fear mongering and hate. But here, Philadelphia Pride was upended by people who claim to be part of our community. Philly Pride Presents had its problems, but it also had thousands of good hearted volunteers over the years, all of which - including what they had learned about organizing a huge public event - was discarded by PHL Pride Collective when it handed itself the reins.
PHL Pride Collective is a vanity project by a group of narcissists only loosely tethered to the community, passive warriors who believe the more letters in the LGBTQQIAA+ alphabet soup they eat, the more important they are. They collect identities like Pokemon, with cries for equitable distribution at their behest to be compounded by how quantifiably special each one individually is. Using the word "collective" is ironic. Their tagline should read "FUCK EQUALITY!"
They've stacked the chess board in their favor, surrounding themselves with eight genderless queens. They're untouchables masquerading as freedom fighters. Call them out and you're racist or transphobic. Once was a time when nuance would get lost in text messages and IMs only to be resolved with some face to face clarity later. Now we speak in a linguistically arrested series of sentence fragments with no room for interpretation. What's said is what's meant, full stop, and in the politically polarized realm we live in, rational detractors are afraid of landing on the "wrong" side of a sensitive debate, forced into silence by radicals willing to cancel them with a Tweet.
There are a lot of worthy causes out there. The world is literally on fire. But not everything should be lumped under Pride's umbrella, it's crowded enough as it is. Somehow the gay and lesbian community became a catch-all for everything that didn't have a parade. Now that we're a footnote in our own community, we're lumped in with other causes that already have their own months and holidays as an afterthought.
Vegan? Come aboard! We'll toss all the flesh eaters off the float! Autistic? Great! Homosexuals are mentally defective too!
Gay cop? Get out! Gay soldier? Problematic. Gainfully employed homeowners who pay their taxes? That's not really what we're about.
I feel bad for what our nation did to the Native Americans centuries ago, but why does this year's Pride march feature a land acknowledgement for the Lanape People? Was there no room left in PHL Pride Collective's itinerary for pandas and whales?
The theys and thems behind this year's Pride march don't care about what anyone went through before them because it pivots the spotlight away from their own marginalization and pet causes, or so that's how they see it. In reality, the past experiences of all gay men and women - dare I say even white ones - are not a threat to the tangential experiences of people today. The trans rights movement used gay and lesbian successes as a blueprint to say, "we're next," then turned around and called us transphobic because we claimed to still exist. PHL Pride Collective is too vain to recognize the fact that little gay boys and girls still kill themselves, that gay men and women in conservative and rural areas are still reviled by their neighbors and snake handlers hypocritically preaching "do unto others."
It seems the only people not represented by today's gay community are actual homosexuals. It's kind of ironic that a community that solely exists because of sex and gender was stolen by a bunch of non-binary virgins who think sex is a weapon. If the far Rights hates homosexuals as much as they claim the Good Book does, they should be championing the Radical Left, because it's tearing us apart and stripping away our voices. In the wake of Sunday's Pride march, I fear nothing will be left but the rubble of five decades of hard work.
And they'll blame us.
