I enjoyed myself.The rapid rise of the Twitter account Accidentally Based surprised even the person who created it. It did not have the transformative effect I thought it would - I thought once I attended, something final and intense would happen.
Some drag queens standing on truck beds rolled by, throwing beads.
I put on a sleeveless shirt and jorts, which I thought was the unspoken uniform, unsure what to expect. I attended my first Pride parade in Oklahoma City right after I graduated college with someone I’ll call Matthew, one of my first gay friends. It’s “out.” By participating in that violent tradition of masculinity, we can spare ourselves, even if it comes at the expense of all those in our community for whom it is not an option. The fear is vulnerability, and the Pride parade makes it impossible to hide, to be a chameleon. But its rewards are enough for some.ĭeeply rooted misogyny and a performed disdain for all things feminine is a hallmark of masculinity, and a necessary action to procure its benefits - like not being harassed or assaulted on the street, a benefit that isn’t on the table for other queer people. For gay men who are white and/or cisgender, gay men who are adjacent to the access straight white men enjoy in society, distancing ourselves from anything that marginalizes us can be a way to cling to privilege. We punish ourselves if we have to, if it keeps others from getting to us first. We see gayness punished with violence, and we replicate that violence so as to avoid it. Gay men are also conditioned to see gayness as an intrusion, a disruption. What I’ve found is that this instinct against Pride parades and gayness in general isn’t confined to straight men. Over the years, I’ve tinkered with his reaction, tried to solve the puzzle of his animus, because I thought doing so might explain everything. There was no one on the Capitol Mall that morning in D.C. “Shoving it down our throats” is another common complaint, because at the core of many straight men’s homophobia lies a phantom violation: imaginary gay men who want to touch them without permission, to objectify them, to threaten their masculinity. “Do you need to shove it down our throats?” It rests on the unspoken argument that, by merely existing, the parade has asked the critic to participate. “But do you really need a parade?” a common retort goes. It asks to be celebrated, challenges its surroundings with its naked desire to be seen it seeks to make its bystanders collaborators. Parades are garish, extravagant things, after all. It’s more common for homophobes to say they hate the Pride parade than it is for them to say they hate Pride itself. To hate Pride is to hate the moral chaos queerness promises upon hegemony, and to condemn it is to protect the status quo it seeks to upend. It’s the same line of thinking that social conservatives take, wherein the parade is a sort of bogeyman. But I’m not like the gay people you hate, those who bring it on themselves by being so flamboyant.Ĭondemning the Pride parade that night was a convenient way for me to cram everything straight people didn’t like about gay people into one symbolic event and then throw it away. I had retained them anyway, and maybe I thought I could exempt myself from the collective force of their verdict through compromise. Or maybe it was fear, uncomplicated and crude, because I had privately retained every threat and insult and disparaging remark I’d ever heard about gay people, even though I’d pretended they didn’t apply to me and I wasn’t bothered, terrible things like what Jake had said, violent things.