Pride experiences
With a lot of parades and parties behind us, I think now is as good a time as ever to discuss 2023 Pride. What did you do? Was it different than last year, and if so, was it more or less fun?
Having experienced pride both in Israel and in Europe, I can say that this year in Tel Aviv was a very strange vibe for me. There were a lot of talks about potential terror attacks, to the point where the side streets were absolutely full of police and military. I remember walking back home from work and being unsure if I should even go.
Contrast it with Berlin, where there was such a carefree attitude and such a strong sense of unity. I experienced it as a tourist mind you, but I still wish we could have a less stressful atmosphere next year back home.
There is something to be said about the monetization of pride, but to me, just the fact that we have something to unite around is enough. When I look around and see thousands of queer people smiling, I couldn't care less about capitalism, and I only hope that next year it'll be even bigger.
I went to London Trans Pride this year. My first pride ever (well except for accidentally and incidentally wandering into Manchester Pride last year, but that's a story for another time). I struggle a lot with crowds and loud noises, but felt a need to go, with everything that has been going on here and worldwide.
The experience of the march was complicated and difficult for me emotionally. Something that really strikes me about pride is that, at least the way I see it, the whole thing inheres in the expression of such a massive and deep mosaic of pain through a performance of jubilation and celebration. So I'm feeling both of these usually mutually exclusive emotional extremes at once. I'm joyous and so proud of all the people around me and their bravery on that and every day; celebrating their wit and humour and performances. Meanwhile I'm constantly either in tears or on the edge of them at what has been done to us, and that this bravery is necessary just for us to survive.
There were placards about people's lost relatives, cis people expressing that their trans partners aren't hurting anyone and to please just leave them alone, people offering parental hugs ... All of these performances connect to my (and my partner's) personal experiences in such a raw and direct way, and it was at once amazing to see and experience the solidarity, and horrible to see the untold extent of pain they implied.
I'm still not sure what exactly to take from the experience, and from that emotional difficulty, but I suppose I just wanted to express something about it, and to say that it has been weighing on me.
I can't imagine how it is to be trans in places like the UK right now. The thought of LGBT suffering crossed my mind a lot during the parade in Berlin - I think it's easy to forget that just because one place in the west has it good, doesn't mean the struggle is done. I recalled the LGBT centers burned by the Nazis when they rose to power, as thousands of us walked down the very streets they did. It comforts me that despite everything, we persevere, and at least some of us can live in peace.
Your emotions, complicated as they may be, are completely understandable. It's jarring to be happy in the face of injustice, but I firmly believe that just like before, we'll claw our way out tooth and nail if we have to.
Thank you for sharing.
I wanted to add this as a comment so it doesn't drown out the main discussion post, but I've noticed a significantly higher amount of queer youth in the parades. It warms my heart, having grown up watching my town become more progressive by the year, that we really are reaching a point where kids can be themselves.
That being said, it's hard to ignore the fact that there are people who treat pride as a very sexual thing. People walking around naked, in fetish gear, etc - and I wonder if it might be time to be a bit more careful. Of course, I don't think children need to be "protected" from pride or whatever, but I can't say I'm comfortable walking down the street with fourteen year olds on one side and naked sixty year olds on the other.
I can only agree with your last point there. Maybe I'm a bit of a prude, which is kind of rare among queer folk... But I think that pride as a concept cannot simultaneously be about families and children and also an adult audience bringing kinks into public view like that
With that said though, I didn't see a single person in kink gear at Odense pride this year. People wore fun outfits and colourful make-up etc., and someone was in a fursuit, but everyone was definitely clothed lol
I also think there are differences to being naked or in kink gear and then wearing booty shorts and pasties, for example, which are more on the borderline for me. Difference being one is a purposefully sexualized outfit and the latter is more of a feminist type of thing - if wording it like that makes sense? English isn't my first language 😅
Anyway it's not like seeing a naked man is going to traumatize any 14 year old but yeah it's a bit inappropriate... It reminds me of back in the 60's and 70's here in Denmark where child porn was legal because of the way too eager sexual liberation movement - it's not the same today but I feel there are parallels
Respectability politics does no one any good. I'm sick and tired of the kink at pride discourse. It's exhausting. We shouldn't even engage in these kinds of conversations, they aren't meant to include queer folks but as a way to divide us or as a way to formalize a reason to crack down or stop pride events.
The irony of this take is that it does, in fact, exclude people. Honestly, as someone who is queer and kinky, I really hate when the argument is shut down in this way, this all-or-nothing thinking. The last thing Pride, being a radical celebration of who you are, should be about is exclusion of non-kinky folks. Demanding kinkiness in queerness is so antithetical to what Pride should be about, yet that is exactly what engaging in (actual) kink in public at Pride achieves, what demanding kink everywhere at Pride accomplishes. Kink belongs at Pride, yes. There are very strong links to kink in the history of Pride, yes. Kinky people played an integral role in Pride from it's very origins, yes. But kink is not everything that Pride should be about, the end-all-be-all of the celebration and the concept. The thing is, so many people conflate gear with kink- that Advocate piece cited in the Vox article you linked is definitely guilty of that. Kink is a dynamic, it's not defined by your outfit. And if that dynamic is apparent to others who have not consented to engage in kink, yes, that is a massive violation of the concept of consent. Anyone who engages in kink should understand consent to that degree, and you're not a safe partner in kink if you insist on others engaging, actively or passively, without the ability for everyone there to offer that consent. That's hands-down the gold standard within kink communities, and I find a LOT of queer people who argue for kink everywhere at Pride generally make this argument that shows they don't seriously engage in kink to begin with, they just see it as automatically hand-in-hand with the queer identity without considering what that actually means.
It's a sticky issue, because it's easy to make the "think of the children" argument from there. And you're absolutely right that that's an exhausting argument to push back against. But a leather daddy showing up in gear isn't necessarily engaging in a kink dynamic. Someone going topless and wearing minimal coverings isn't necessarily engaging in kink. Someone attending Pride in a furry costume isn't necessarily engaging in kink. A Dom(me) leashing their sub and walking them, though- that is an example of kink. And while there absolutely should be spaces for that at Pride, people who don't engage in kink should also absolutely have a space available to them to celebrate where they don't have to manage those violations of consent (the same also goes for people who simply don't want to engage in kink at Pride- not in the least because a lot of engagement in kink does often stem from exposure to and experience with trauma in some way, it's an incredibly powerful tool to regain control over your own sexuality, and when consent is violated and control over that experience is lost, that can be very damaging).
There are a lot of problems with this take, one of them being the inherent argument against the inclusion of certain sexualities, or even certain kinks. Do aces not belong at queer celebrations? Demanding kinkiness from everyone at Pride, even passively through public play, essentially says "these are the only people allowed to be considered queer and you don't belong if you're not celebrating your active experience with sex". And who gets to define which kinks are "acceptable" for public consumption and which aren't? There are some extremely taboo forms of kink that are so incredibly empowering to those who engage in them, that are valid kinks and affirmations of queerness, that definitely should not be engaged in around others who haven't actively consented.
Pride is meant to be a radical celebration of people being who they are, it isn't an automatic license to engage in kink without the normal considerations that should always accompany kinkiness. And to argue otherwise is, in fact, a form of exclusion, a way to try to push for a conformity in queerness, even if that conformity isn't the cis-het ideal. You may be tired of people saying there should be non-kinky spaces at Pride, but honestly I'm tired of other queer people demanding their ideal of kinkiness from my queerness, even though I'm queer and kinky myself. It's just another way I don't belong for a lot of queer people, sadly- I'm a pan gal who has faced so much bi erasure I honestly am uncomfortable in more "traditional" queer spaces that aren't openly radical, and I'm kinky enough to know the red flags surrounding consent that people who insist on kink in queer spaces without question are waving about. In both situations, the message really does boil down to "you don't belong here". And like I said, that's antithetical to the entire point of Pride in the first place.
This is a well thought out response, but I'm left wondering who the intended audience is? I wasn't arguing that we shouldn't have a conversation about non-kinky spaces at pride. Nothing I linked made that assertion (or at least, didn't appear to, the way I interpreted it). In fact, until now, I've actually never heard of such a radical stance. On the spectrum of absolutely zero kink at pride, to only kink at pride, this is really far on one end, and as of such should garner a lot of skepticism of sincerity - anyone who's making this claim is more than likely doing so to value signal, make a political stance, or further some issue they feel strongly about while ignoring the realities of public spaces.
My experience of nearly every kink at pride discourse has been the experiences I linked - people using it as a wedge issue to divide and have people endlessly bicker about what the "right amount" is. In other words, it's respectability politics. The reality is that in public spaces, no one individual gets to decide that. The people that are present decide where that barometer ends up, and sometimes they push too far in a direction that other people don't like. Pride itself started this way - it became a riot because they pushed too radically in one direction for others to let it happen without pushing back via violence. Neither you nor I get to decide whether someone is going to be kinky in public in the same way that you can't decide whether someone goes to the store wearing underwear or not. We can establish rules that make things illegal, but even then some people will just break the law. The discussion focuses far too much on what those rules should be and ignores that the event itself is a celebration of breaking said rules.
The only reasonable discussion to have around kink at pride is are ones like the conversation you present here, one discussing the merits of consent culture and helping to expose people to how others think and how to be considerate. We cannot force this on people. We can suggest that spaces exist that are kink free, but we shouldn't be doing so in a vacuum- that is to say, we shouldn't try and enforce that the entirety of pride is kink free (or the reverse), because that isn't a fruitful discussion. The problem that I see is that people who broach the "kink shouldn't be at pride" are almost always playing the respectability politics card. They hyperfocus on some of the issues and paint them as black and white issues over which we somehow have control by setting "rules" and ignore the history of breaking said rules. They ignore that we can't control others and they ignore that this erases and subjects us all to a form of normativity. I haven't seen people who have argued that pride should be a kink-enforced zone as you've suggested here, but that similarly would be hyperfocused on the celebration of breaking rules and breaking normativity and would ignore the realities of people experiencing or seeing things they didn't want to see or didn't know they might see. It would ignore the benefits of teaching people about healthy consent, about having conversations about where it is appropriate and inappropriate to conform to rules and the reason rules exist, the usefulness of social contracts, and the benefits of behaving in public spaces from time to time.
It's primarily an issue of framing - it's clear that most of these discussions are meant to divide because they aren't balanced or nuanced takes on the sides present. They often focus on one very specific slant, in my experience respectability politics, and they don't even bother to address any criticism of their stance. They don't acknowledge that public spaces are public, and therefore a balancing act of the people present with a structure in place to avoid too much deviation. They erase people's experiences by failing to acknowledge them. This lack of nuance makes me highly skeptical of anyone who brings up kink at pride discourse, because it's rare that people bring it up in a way where this is addressed -it's almost always a one line zinger meant to engage people's emotions over all else.
I'm tired of it too I suppose, especially in mainstream debates. It makes me roll my eyes anytime LGBT+ issues of any kind come up lol, because there are almost never good takes. Especially this one is an issue that has been overblown thousandfold and I agree it's used to divide. However I still think it's relevant and valid to want talk about it internally in in-group spaces like here on ~lgbt. Queer people make up hundreds of millions of people around the world so of course our opinions differ on things, this being just one of many
I'm not sure about that. A major component of increasing acceptance of gay people in the past two decades has been the increased presence and portrayal of gay people in mass television and film as normal people. In the past, gay people were seen as deviants having a non-mainstream lifestyle.
Ellen Degeneres and Modern Family have arguably moved public opinion more than any other phenomenon. They have introduced the concept of gay people in a digestible, acceptable format compatible with the worldviews of tens of millions of Americans.
I don't know why they don't just have two separate events.
They definitely do have separate events but every parade is different. There are often more family friendly events in the daytime and then different adult focused music festival type areas later on that kids aren’t allowed in.
I think people are a little too protective of kids at times though. I went to pride when I was 12 and the overt sexual nature of it definitely made me a bit uncomfortable at times, but I feel like being able to realize what I am comfortable with on my own was a good learning experience.
Well there definitely are separate events, if you look at the program for Copenhagen Pride for example. There are many different venues. But the parade itself is hard to separate although I do feel it's in sections
if they did that, and had "no kink allowed Pride" and "kink allowed Pride", that wouldn't actually solve the problem, it would just shift it (and magnify it).
who do you appoint as the "kink police" for the no-kink-allowed Pride event? "too kinky for the family-and-corporate-sponsor-friendly Pride event" is a classic "I can't define it, but I'll know it when I see it" problem. who gets to make that judgement call? who gets to say "that's over the line, we're kicking you out"?
meanwhile, what's to stop homophobes and transphobes and various bad faith actors, the Tuckers Carlson of the world, from cherry-picking examples of the most risqué costumes at the "family-friendly" Pride event, and complaining about those? there will never be a sanitized-enough version of Pride that would make all the critics happy and put an end to the respectability-politics criticism.
Pride is about inclusion and acceptance. having a Pride event that is defined by the things it excludes does not advance that goal.
Well like my state, topless is legal for both genders, but across the river you need pasties. Also pride is about not hiding or conforming to conservative values. So it's hard to draw a line in the sand. Though i do think swimsuit should be the bare minimum.
In Singapore this was the first Pride month since a colonial era law outlawing gay sex was finally [repealed] (https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/parliament-repeals-section-377a-endorses-amendments-protecting-marriage-definition) after years of being unenforced. However this only came after repeated legal challenges to the statute which led the courts closer to overturning it. The executive chose to take action instead.
However...
However at the same sitting
Emphasis my own. This is what Article 156 in the first quote refers to.
There's clearly some way left to go. Nonetheless we work our way toward salvation with fear and trembling.
This is our major Pride event.
I love pride. Here it's the day where the queer and rainbow clothed people can take over the entire city center and just exist and have fun and get drunk and party etc.
My favorite pride was probably 2021 because in that year they didn't have the big touring tracks that were sponsered by big companies and instead it was just a regular parade with people bringing their own music etc, and no corporate ads plastered anywhere.
Corp ads keep pride events alive. Like ads on YouTube channels so there is money for security and permits and other things.
You have to be very, very careful with relying on corporate contributions. Ultimately, most are just doing it as a cheap form of advertising. Look at the hysteria around Dylan Mulvaney and Budlight.
Mulvaney's sponsorship was a very minor thing. Budlight sent her a custom can with her face on it, and she featured it in one of her videos. This wasn't some big special promotion to advance or feature trans people. Mulvaney is not the only person or the first person Budlight has done this for. It was likely just part of a larger ad campaign where they featured custom cans to various influencers.
And the right wing echo chambers went into a frothing madness. They whipped up a frenzy about the usual bullshit, from communism to groomers. And a circus followed.
But what exactly did Mulvaney do? Did she do something obscene? Did she go on camera and say, "only trans people drink Budlight?" Did she use the Budlight can in some depraved sex act? Did she produce a video featuring a child drinking out of the can?
No. She did nothing like that. She simply featured it in a very bland, run-of-the-mill promo. It was nothing that she did that made the promo controversial. The fervor was entirely about who she is.
And that's the real horror of this whole thing. A cisgender woman could have made the exact same promo, word for word, shot for shot, and it would have never received a single bit of coverage. What the right wing is saying is that something is perverted or "grooming" simply BECAUSE it includes a trans person. Any media that features a trans person is "grooming." Trans people simply living their lives and being in public is "grooming."
This is old school, absolute bigotry in its lowest form. It's saying that certain people shouldn't be allowed in public or in the public sphere. In this view, trans people are acting as "groomers" for doing nothing more than simply existing.
It is hard to think of a more clear-cut example of unambiguous bigotry. Again, if she had done something really risque or objectionable in the promo, that might be different. But the ONLY objection to her promo was that it featured a trans person. Conservatives got riled up simply because a trans person dared to exist openly in public.
And how did Budlight respond? They immediately folded like a house of cards. They could have come out, defended her, and outright said, "why are you objecting to this? We make dozens or hundreds of ads no different from this every single year. We will not bow down in the face of overt bigotry." Hell, they could have even explicitly put out a shot-for-shot remake of the Mulvaney spot, but with a cisgender actor or influencer, just to point out the absurdity of the outrage.
But they didn't. Again, this wasn't because of something Mulvaney did, this was simply because of who she was. If you're not willing to stand up against the most blatantly obvious cases of in-your-face bigotry, how will you act when it's not so obvious?
There are many times that corporations drop sponsorships because of the behavior of the sponsored person. If a sponsored athlete commits a serious crime, even if they are of a racial minority group, no one will object. But imagine if a company dropped a black NFL player, not because they were involved in some crime or huge scandal, but simply because the right wing decided that it was offensive to see black people in public. Imagine the outrage that would cause.
But that is exactly what Budlight has done. They didn't defend Mulvaney, even though the sole and only reason her sponsorship was controversial in any way, was because of her being trans. The only crime she committed was daring to exist as an out and open trans person. And Budlight dropped her immediately when the outrage machine threatened their profits.
And in doing so, they gave a very clear path for fascists to target out LGBT people, and especially trans people. Trans people have historically suffered very high unemployment and underemployment rates precisely because of this kind of bigotry. People deem the simple public existence of trans people offensive, sexual, or objectionable, and companies refuse to hire them.
Sorry for the long example, but it really shows why pride events should be very, very careful about taking on corporate sponsors. Budlight faced a test or their character. They were happy to waive a rainbow flag as a cheap form of PR. But when it really came down to brass tacks, when they truly faced a real test of their hearts, they utterly failed. They cared more about profits than doing the right thing. And if standing up to bigots means a drop in sales, they will appease the bigots every time.
And this is why corporate sponsorships are so dangerous to pride. It gives fascists a way to target these organizations to seek to defund and destroy them. The right wing is very good at using their echo chambers to whip their base into a frenzy. If they see a company supporting pride, they just have to boycott them, protest them, or have an army of armed thugs show up outside of their headquarters. In states where open carry is legal, right wing protests often show up in body armor carrying AR-15s. They do so as to implicitly threaten to murder the people they are protesting. They skirt the edge of the law to provide legal deniability, but ultimately they do this as a way to threaten the lives of the latest group of people they've decided doesn't deserve to exist. The correct response is for a targeted corporation to hire their own armed guards, but as we see, many can be intimidated into silence.
This is the danger of relying on corporations for pride. Corporations are only in it for the money. And if they do the math and find that on a given issue, supporting the bigots will make more money than supporting their victims, corporations will support the bigots every single time. I don't know why you would expect any different in our current economy dominated by the "shareholder theory" corporate and legal schools of thought.
Yes, corporate sponsorship does produce some benefits. It allows pride groups to hold much larger and more elaborate events than they would be able to off of donations alone. But it also makes your group vulnerable. Your corporate sponsors can always become victims of fascist intimidation campaigns. And if they are, it is almost certain they will fold. They always do.
A case can be made that pride events would be much, much more resilient to right wing intimidation campaigns by foregoing corporate sponsorship. Yes, that does hinder growth. Instead of getting sponsors for a given float, you get donations to your general fund. You invest those donations into an event fund. Then you limit the scope and cost of your pride events to whatever your can sustainably cover from the proceeds of those investments. If corporations want to provide support, they can provide contributions to the pride fund. But that simply increases the size of the fund, and it doesn't leave the pride group vulnerable to the fickle whims of the fair weather friends corporate sponsors tend to be.
I was at the local pride parade back in june for the first time. It was a very nice atmosphere, but I regretted not bringing earplugs — the primary music choice of the parade vans was simply “loud”.
The same thing happened to me and the friend I went with. She has sensitive hearing, too, which led us to try and walk in between the vans where the music was quietest. Definitely an oversight.
Pride in my city isn't until November. I'll probably be assisting in the parade. Last year I was at the back making sure everyone got there safely, we were supposed to communicate to the front to make em wait for big gaps, but our radios were too weak so we had no connection..
Pride in my city isn't until 4th August. A friend of mine was planning to come up from the south and we would go together. There's an all-day anti-corporate rave that we were planning to head to after the parade. But she's been co-opted into the on-call rota at work, and so she can't come now. I don't have a huge amount of queer friends in the city, and I don't want to go to Pride alone, so it looks like I might be sitting this year out :(
I attended Gettysburg, PA pride last month as an ally and in support of my wife, who is pan. It was really awesome seeing so many people (and young people...that caught me off guard, but I'm so happy for them) be able to freely express themselves like that. Just walking around completely fearless like that. I think it was good for my wife as well. She has definitely made huge strides in being comfortable with herself and with it has come a lot of changes in hairstyle and clothing. And she's not always comfortable out in public like that because it's a pretty rural area. She gets a lot of weird looks from old idiots because she colors her bangs and wears clothing I can only lovingly describe as "light lesbian chic". But at pride she fit right in and it made me happy to see her like that.
As for the event itself, it was actually a full weekend of activities, but we just attended the main event of the town square being closed off for a concert and a ton of vendors. I was surprised to see two Christian churches with booths, along with my Unitarian Universalist church's booth. I didn't speak to anyone at either of them, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they were more liberal churches and genuinely showing support. I know there are LGBTQ+ Christians out there and I'm glad that there are progressive churches out there that can show them love and support.
As for my UU church's booth, they were handing out skittles and conducting "glitter blessings" where our part-time pastor would say some words of affirmation and sprinkle glitter on you.
All in all it just made me happy to be there. It's such a rural area and I feel like a black sheep just being a liberal. I can only begin to imagine how hard it is for members of the LGBTQ+ community living here. Seeing a cause I'm passionate about flourish despite the overwhelming amount of conservatives around here was awesome.
I'm very curious about your experience with this in Tel Aviv. Did it make you feel safer that there was so much police and military? Or did it make you feel uneasy?
Honestly, I'm conflicted about this.
I thought the rumors about hate crimes and the like were overblown, but then seeing so many officers and volunteers there made me think maybe there's something to it. I remember thinking: if this is the kind of force they expect to be necessary, what are they expecting?
Tel Aviv is a tourist city and part of me thinks that maybe the government - wanting to avoid an international disaster - went overkill despite there being not a lot of real risk. In April of this year an Italian tourist was killed in a ramming attack on the exact street the parade went past, and it's becoming more common by the day, so I can see the concern.
I marched in London Pride earlier this month. You might have seen that the parade was interrupted by Just Stop Oil protestors. I didn't see it myself as we were ahead of where they interrupted the parade, but we got to talking about it later.
Kind of a hard one. At the core, I don't disagree with their message. But on the other hand, this was a parade to demonstrate inclusivity and to stand up as a group and say TERFS aren't okay and we stand with our trans friends. It felt like being usurped in a way. And I couldn't help having a "Fuck off" defensive response. I feel conflicted and guilty about being conflicted.
Have to say tho... London does a really good job of keeping the counter protestors and anti LGBTQ+ folk corralled away from the flow. Was a good day with amazing vibes and I got to hang out with the cast of Heartstopper!