Is There a Point to Gay Pride?
By Andy Heath
When I was a child growing up in rural Tennessee, I quickly realized I was in a highly racist society. People thought nothing about making jokes about blacks and generally looking down on them. So whenever there was a celebration of black culture, students would frequently ask, "Why can't we celebrate white culture too?"
I'm going to attempt to answer a similar question today. Is there truly a point to celebrating being gay and having festivals such as Gay Pride? The answer is a definite YES.
You see gays, like blacks, have a similar culture and history. We have similar experiences and we share similar themes throughout our lives. At some point, we realize that we're gay, and we are traumatized by this. Then we come to the point where we come out, and this is also traumatizing to us. If we are lucky, we come to a point where we celebrate our sexuality and all that goes with it. We learn to love ourselves and accept love from others. We learn to enjoy and appreciate sex, but more importantly, we learn to appreciate ourselves as good people who are not committing a sin against any god. We learn to appreciate our literature, our art, our culture. We go to gay bars. We go on gay retreats. We go to churches that affirm us if we choose to practice a religion.
When I was in college, I heard the question in the first paragraph asked a different way. "When can we have Straight Pride Week?" Straight students at ETSU in Johnson City, Tennessee, could not fathom why gays would want to celebrate our sexuality. One student responded to this question by saying that Straight Pride Week is every week.
I, however, have a slightly different answer. Straight people have different experiences than gay people, but they don't share a common experience. Straight people, as a group, are not brought together by discrimination against them by their families. Their mothers all agree to go to their weddings. Society celebrates their unions, and the government recognizes them. Ultimately, there is nothing in straight society that brings them together (except to some extent the hatred of gays, but even this does not bring together all straight people).
During gay pride celebrations, we celebrate our culture. We celebrate our brief history as we come more and more into the light of the media. We celebrate our love, our relationships, our friends that are sometimes closer to us than our estranged family members. We celebrate our literature and art and music and theater. We celebrate the accomplishments of our tribe. We mourn the loss of our people like Matthew Shepherd who was cruelly murdered in cold blood by those that hate us. And we come together once a year to remember who we are and what it means to be gay. We remember what it means to be gay because it really does mean something - something more than just sex. We are more than our sexuality. We ARE a culture, a history, and breathing human beings that share a common experience.
The reason we don't have Straight Pride Week is because there is simply nothing to celebrate.
