Pride IS Important
I saw this quote, or some version of it, earlier and had conflicted feelings. I’m no stranger to gay shame, but the gay agenda is bigger and badder. Here’s my non-exhaustive list of why Pride remains important.
(Author unknown, credit to caption)
Pride is Important Because:
1. Queers are exhorted to gratefully lend our support to the imperial war machine—as if we also haven’t been persecuted as a threat to “civilization,” as if queerness and queer love ends at our borders.
2. The Right is engaged in a full-scale, deep-pocketed war on reproductive rights, trans & queer rights, and sex workers’ rights — and we need to unite in opposition.
3. Sex work remains criminalized and people in the sex trades are policed, subordinated, and still waiting for decriminalization to become a central goal of LGBTQ+ movements.
4. Most students are still having inconsistent, medically inaccurate, culturally incompetent, anti-LGBTQ, abstinence-only sex education shoved down their throats.
5. Only 26 states require Medicaid to cover gender-affirming health care and only 24 states require private insurers to cover gender-affirming care; because intersex youth are still being subjected to medically unnecessary, “normalizing” treatments; because as long as we don’t have universal health care, queer people will face disproportionate coverage gaps and discrimination in health care systems.
6. Our attempts to create and maintain vibrant, diverse, affirming public sexual cultures - where we get to explore the radical possibilities of pleasure, play, desire, and to learn through human contact - are thwarted by the law, capital, and prudish neighbors.
7. Because the marriage equality movement was spurred by unjust immigration policies but immigrant, undocumented, and asylum-seeking queers are being locked up, deported, abused, and denied dignity.
8. US Congress still hasn’t passed a law explicitly forbidding discrimination based on sexuality, gender identity or expression in employment, housing, and public accommodations; because 40% of Black trans adults live in poverty; and queers are more likely to be unemployed, lack benefits, and earn less on the dollar than other workers.
9. Our institutions enshrine the heterodomestic, child-rearing couple as the standard for adult families and relationships; while punishing poor and BIPOC families, separating recently arrived families, and marginalizing those who desire something beyond the dyadic, monogamous, family norm.
10. If the best we can do is demand dignity based on some essential selfhood begging to be accepted, and not because we demand the freedom to fuck (or not) as we please; to do gender in the way we wish; to organize our intimate, familial, and economic existence differently; to think and live differently, then we’ve already conceded too much ground in this fight.