With a series of bangs that echoed across the Hudson river, the NYC Pride Weekend’s fireworks cast soft colors onto a pier where some thousand-odd gay men were gathered. Claiming the entire riverbank, the spectacle was incredible to behold, a radical takeover of much of Manhattan. It seemed it must draw the eyes of everyone near the river -- everyone who would, on a normal night, would carry out lives unrelated to me or the queer struggle.
Yet oddly enough, it was not the fireworks but the entire night skyscape– brief, violent flashes bracketed by a black and empty background – that served better as a metaphor for my feelings towards NYC Pride. This was supposed to be the celebration of the lengths our community has come -- this was a true expression of pride, hope, and openness? At its heart, NYC Pride felt misguided and hypocritical, a giant rat-race, where the only way to beat back the loneliness was to further exclude.
Pride weekends have long been an litmus test to myself about where I stood in relation to the queer community. I remember the first pride parade that I had access to – North Carolina’s Triangle Pride parade, a noisy nine-block affair that I heard from within my college’s freshman library. I told myself I was busy working on a math problem set, but in reality I think I was a bit too unsure of myself to attend. A year of identity grappling later found me excitedly awaiting San Francisco’s Pride. I cheered on the Dyke March, danced in Castro Street’s Pink Party, watched the parade, and partied in front of the City Hall. I think I’ll never forget the exhilaration that filled me for weeks after. Since then, I marched in the SF and NC Triangle Parades, and watched multiple DC, NYC, and Philadelphia parades. Pride parades symbolize a radical takeover of everyday life: a day-long occupation where streets and daylight – heterosexual spaces – are turned to gay merriment. Prides had never failed to elicit a wave of excitement and, truly, of pride.
Now, though, as the security detail ushered out staggering men from the Pier, which was the grandest example of a Pride Party I had witnessed, I felt none of these things. A general sense of rejection gnawed at me, as did the shame of witnessing a community that seemed eager to ignore its radical and combative history from which it came, espousing none of my ideals of economic inclusion and compassion. I was left wondering: has pride changed, or have I?
It could certainly have been that I have changed. For the past year, my DC life has been incredibly, almost unbelievably gay. I walked six blocks from my house to the Town danceboutique for Friday “Bear Happy Hours”, joined an LGBT rowing team and kickball team, snuck into a “gay gym” called Vida, and accepted any invitation for miscellanous gay socializing that came my way. As a result, long stretches of social time (i.e. weeks) were gay, uninterrupted by a surrounding heterosexual world. Gay networking -- it felt like the spread of a forest fire -- juxtaposed ease with hard limits: I could amass 30 new contacts in a night, yet each contact had a sort of strange, tacit ceiling. After a year of meeting new DC gays and a truly incredible amount of new names and faces, I felt as though I could count on only one hand the number of couches I could call on in an emergency. The led me to a strange limbo of comfort and distance in the gay community, a weird co-occurrence of feeling I belong here if I keep trying and will I ever be embraced? Could this be why Pride felt more frivolous – a radical gay takeover for me was neither necessary nor particularly wanted?
I ambled past a small city of the Pier’s portable toilets, glanced at a shirtless, stumbling body, and shook my head briefly. No, that was not the whole answer.
On a socioeconomic level, something just felt wrong with the Pier event. Real economic problems exist and persist in our community – an queer couple with children is more than 2 times as likely as a hetersexual couple with children to be living in poverty, and a trans-person is four times likely to earn below $10k/year compared to their straight counterpart -- yet the ticket prices for the Pier Party were $100 by the time I arrived, and there an even more expensive VIP access. For whom was this celebration supposed to be? Wealthy, urban, mostly white gays who have in many respects already won the fight, or the larger portion of our community that desperately needs support/empowerment? At its heart, the Pier Party created a space of economic exclusivity that ran contrary to the heart of the great, diverse rainbow spectrum that Pride seeks to showcase. To be clear, I believe that the irony of the Pier’s hierachical ticket price absolutely cannot be underemphasized: wealthy gay men need to take hard and critical looks at our own excess, or we risk becoming economic oppressors in the same system that once so greatly oppressed us.
Now, clearly, the Pier Party was not the only attraction of Pride; perhaps the major event was the Parade. Although it should be noted that even a free event excludes those without the economic security to choose their own leisure time, the Parade certainly tried, in accessibility and in message, to be as inclusive as possible. In my mind, an inclusive Parade is certainly preferable to an exclusive Pier; however, perhaps because of inclusivity, the Parade felt more straight than ever before.
I believe strongly in economic inclusion, but I believe that social inclusion should be approached carefully and with restraint. I think we need to remember that gay spaces serve an essential purpose of establishing and passing on gay community norms, conceptions of identity, and shared struggle. The first gay bar I ever attended, NYC’s Splash, was one of the most liberating experiences of my life – in contrast to the outside world, I finally felt I shared a space with a majority of people who had shared my experience of identity struggle, sexual experimentation, and self discovery. (Incidentally, Splash has since closed.)
However, our modern times are seeing what I would consider a frightening dissolution of the gay bar identity: a recent survey discovered a net decrease of 15 gay bars a year in the US, due mainly to declining bar attendance (the study attributed this to the rise of the hookup apps.) The remaining gay bars are at risk of a harder-to-measure effect I’d like to call “hetero-colonialization”: a flood of straight women seek “safe spaces” in gay bars, which then attracts straight men. At bars like DC’s “Nellies”, SF’s “The Café”, Philadelphia’s “Woodies”, or NYC’s “Flaming Saddles”, a bachelorette party or 21st birthday seems to be occur nearly every weekend. It’s no small or ignorable occurrence. The rowdy groups of girls are invasive; at Nellie’s, I can count on my personal space being disrupted multiple times a night, with random straight girls pulling me into grind chains or live-streaming my face without permission. Apparently, bartenders have noted in surveys that gay bars have become common spaces for first straight tindr dates, and I’ve personally seen many a straight couple holding hands or even kissing raunchily in a gay bar. It’s difficult to decide whether whether it’s worse to see straight hands held or straight lips kissed. Consider a straight woman holding her man’s hand (how protective! precluding, homophobically, the man from being hit on) while the couple gazes out with shining eyes, progressive, tourists in an exciting safari of gays. Now consider seeing a straight couple kiss: drunken colonizers, lost in each other, unaware that they’re making the gay bar seem just a bit more like any other bar in any other part of the city.
The decline of lesbian bars is apparently even more dramatic: most of America’s star cities, despite having large queer populations, have no operating lesbian bars. One lesbian friend, based in NYC, said that one of her city’s main lesbian bars, the Cubbyhole, has in the past few years become overrun by aggressive gay men. Even more disturbing, she said that when she visited popular NYC gay bars like Industry and Therapy, she estimated that she had a 50% chance of being turned away unless she presented in a very heterofeminine manner. She guessed the hardship of lesbian bars was due more to the rise of Tindr as opposed to hetero-colonialization; obviously, a mechanism of colonization parallel to straight women in gay bars is not occurring in lesbian bars, as straight men certainly do not flood bars seeking solace from the hordes of straight women. Although this seems plausible to me, I do not know enough to comment beyond a general feeling of unease.
Clearly, our community and larger society faces difficult issues difficult issues. I’m not intending to come across as tone-deaf to the difficulties that women face in the unsafe, predatory spaces that many straight bars have become. However, I believe that there are compassionate solutions to the problems straight women face that don’t involve a gradual dissolution of the gay identity. The persecution of both groups share, after all, a common cause of patriarchal oppression; parallel and separate efforts to help strengthen identity bounds will help both.
Why exactly should women be invested in preserving gay culture?
First, from a practical element of the mental health of our younger generation: psychologists are pretty confident that the presence of role models and older mentorship help young people internalize a more robust sense of self-worth. A friend of mine who volunteers for the Trevor Project Hotline told me that the access to gay spaces seemed to have a large positive effect on the calls he took. He said further that he and colleagues joked that, like in the Harry Potter universe where emerging wizards receive an invite to the wizarding world, gays emerging from the closet should an invite to a general queer identity replete with “gay parents” and rainbow apparel. Currently, our community lacks a formal way to establish intergenerational lines of communication, and our youngest and most vulnerable are suffering as a result. The Atlantic recently published an extensive inquiry into the negative psychological effects of online social media: there is a direct correlation from usage to feelings of isolation and loneliness, and for the first time teen suicide rates have surpassed homicide rates. This is an especially worrying trend for the teenage gay cohort.
Second, preserving the gay community preserves part of the inherent beauty of the world. The 21st century saw an army of sociolinguists venture out to record and preserve languages in small groups whose culture was at risk of extinction; clearly, hegemonic spread of dominant culture was seen to shrink the color of world society. Although it’s harder to think of the gay community as one would a small tribe because it feels “just-oh-so-normal”, the gay community is a minority community like any other.
All this brings us back to the Pier Party. Whether I liked it or not, that party seemed a robust gay statement, immune to both hetero-colonialization and economic decline. From my experience, robust gay statements are few: (1) communities on the fringe, like radical faerie collectives and leather groups like Mid-Atlantic Leather, Dore Alley, or the SF Eagle, (2) events that are circuit-like and expensive such as the Pier Party, and (3) sex spaces like sex parties and hook-up apps. Indeed, I would wager that the single largest ~99% gay space in the US currently is the online space of Grindr.
In my mind, options (2) and (3) catch our community between a rock and a hard place: either we face subsumption into larger straight, economically-tiered society, or we retreat into the most sex-related and isolating of spaces. Ironically, it seems our community’s rapid success at fundamental rights might lead to a shrinking of the gay identity into the very misconception from which it originally sought distance: that we, as gay men, exist as a larger identity then merely who we decide to have sex with; that we are gay men because we are gay outside the bedroom as well as inside the bedroom.
So then perhaps the salvation of our community rests in strengthening and bolstering option (1): embracing the fringe, the weird. The good news is that these still exist: the revolutionary, the radical, the churning at the frontiers, the queer identity that is so fundamentally divergent from heteromasculine society that the mere act of participating in it necessarily strengthens parallel struggles for equality. The good news too is that there is certainly latent desire to correct for worrying trends in gay society: The New York Times recently published an excellent and hilariously sourced article on the decline of gay bars, which I saw go viral across many friends’ facebooks. The tough news is that investing in these frontier spaces will take serious and deliberate effort: it will take self-limitation and even deletion when it comes to online apps and normative spaces, it will take critical self-reflection about whether one is merely acquiescing to normative conceptions of masculinity, and it will take a constant adventurous spirit to push one beyond the rat-races of current or “lazy” gay society.
My queer friends: we’ve accomplished a lot both personally, in our self-realization and actualization, and societally, where the closet has expanded and became easier for many to open. Let’s not rest on our laurels or forget the less privileged segments of our community. Let’s shift our focus away from looking sexy at places like the Pier Party, and more towards making a more equal and compassionate world for us all.