Via various reports of the goings on in San Franciso last weekend ended up at this blog post which looks at Pride from an entirely different angle:
Yet right on cue, the day after Pride, the Davids of the blogosphere dished out their heavy-handed dissections of parades around the country. Only this year, there was a palpably nastier tone to an already traditionally nasty annual debate. Blame the election, blame the recent avalanche of anti-gay legislation, but this year, the usual assimilationist arguments went beyond the hypothetical speculations that maybe our Pride parades were too outlandish, that maybe we weren’t doing the movement any favors by showing the country a face that happened to be wearing 6-inch long false eyelashes. This year there was some actual discussion about HOW we were going to “fix” Pride parades. Of how we might go about “discouraging” certain “elements” from taking part in the parades.
Joe goes on about that at length in a very amusing manner. It is good stuff, but it also occurred to me that if you just replaced “trannies” with “costumers” he could have been talking about science fiction conventions.
I’ve been rather short-tempered with people over this in the past. It’s a depressing thing to keep hearing, especially from younger gay guys such as the one who once told me that he only wanted to date “normal” gay men, not anyone who was too flamboyant. That’s a matter of taste but it shouldn’t also be an excuse to keep the exhibitionists inside some new kind of closet.
Aside from the irony of a despised minority having its own despised minority, people should never forget it was the trannies and drag queens battling the police at Stonewall and it’s always been the flamers who bore the brunt of social opprobrium. Pieces like Joe’s above remind me of that scene in The Naked Civil Servant where Quentin is asked to leave the clandestine gay club for being too “obvious” and liable to cause them trouble. It’s pretty much the same argument we get today, only in different er…drag.
Sadly, politics being what it is, some people are already peddling the line that there were no trannies or drag queens at Stonewall at all. See here, for example.
Yeah, I think I’ve come across similar comments elsewhere. Crazy.