The Peculiar Power of Pride

I've really struggled with Pride in 2023. 

Our Pride flag this year...

June 23, when I drafted this post, was my parents' wedding anniversary.

My mother would have been 100 years old this year. Thirty-four years old at the time of their wedding, they were a later-in-life marriage for their generation. My mother's inability to bear children of her own was related to her "unmarriage-ability" in the 1950's. A different world, difficult to imagine today.

They were married for 46 years before my father died in 2003.

When I came out to myself at age 14 in 1975, I never thought I'd see gay marriage in my lifetime.

I was 38 when I married my partner in 1999.

Our wedding on Crockett Cove in Deer Isle, ME
1999

I've now been out as a lesbian for almost 50 years and married for 24 of those.

A queer woman: a woman who maintains her femaleness while claiming male power and privilege. Neither she nor he. Still too often, although not as often, the only woman in the room where it happens. A woman who might be mistaken for a man because she insists on retaining her female identity while ignoring the tropes of female beauty and femininity: tropes defined by and created in response to and to please men.

I feel so much pride in and amazement over the changes we've fought to achieve. PRIDE is now EVERYONE's celebration! for a whole month! A flag for every business! So many gay people with dollars to spend! We're here, we're queer, we're everywhere! Oh, and we celebrated. We danced. Did we ever dance. On every street on every pier in every bathroom. Carving out the spaces in which ALL sexuality is ok.

Note to straight women: you all owe that to queer people.

For me, however, PRIDE was always a riot and a march and a protest as well as a party.

We had discrimination and bias, hate and violence to protest then, and we have the same to protest now.

What I continue to be amazed at is how enduring anti-queer and anti-woman biases are, particularly in their more subtle and personally toxic forms. But this shouldn't really be shocking, given the persistence of racism/classism/sexism -- the underpinnings of our White male dominant culture -- in and across all our lives.

Just as we had Anita Bryant in the 1970's working to convince all orange juice drinkers that queer people are subversive to the traditional family and dominance of men (she was right!) today's radical right is trying to turn back the tide on our gender revolution. But today so many more of us are plural, it's easy, within some contexts, to laugh about: outlaw DRAG shows? Seriously.

But lord, it is tiresome. Our straight "allies" don't recognize how tiresome it is. And the danger of constantly dealing with the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of disrespect, toxicity, and assault -- the micro-aggressions -- by those privileged by the dominant culture is especially real for our queer youth, who continue to commit suicide at much higher levels than others in our culture.

I'm 62 and still feeling it.

And it's not just "out there." I experience all kinds of implicit bias and disrespect every day, including subtle but damning disrespect for my 26-year relationship.

You could say I have PTSD from coming of age during the AIDS years in NYC. And that's true: I do. 

Film still from United In Anger:
A History of ACT UP directed
by Jim Hubbard

Who wouldn't? We were living in a holocaust of friends, comrades, lovers dying every day -- and often we had no familial or legal rights to even visit them in the hospital.

We used that tragic holocaust to change many of those legal issues.

But 35 years later, we often find ourselves confronted by what Lakota playwright Larissa Fasthorse calls "performative wokeness:" "good" people who benefit in one way and / or others from the dominant culture -- white people, wealthy people, men, straight women -- and generally claim to be supportive of the rights of queer people -- until they have to ACT respectfully. Until they have to treat our relationships with the same degree of respect and privacy -- and tolerance for them being less-than-perfect -- as they treat heterosexual relationships.

While laws and procedures have changed, the implicit biases creeping about beneath that smooth surface feed the toxicity that has long been internalized in our queer selves: that there can be no "significant other" in a relationship between two women. Just as in the past, there are times when I am treated more as a roommate who must be tolerated than a primary partner. Or when I am merely invisible because I am not a man. Or when people talk about "anger" (read: justifiable fury at oppression) and "control" (read: a woman taking power over her own life) as if they are negative attributes only men are justified in displaying.

While I'm not surprised by these subtleties of disrespect, they still hurt -- and anger -- me.

I can feel how it would make things easier for me to participate in the boom of trans-men and claim male and heterosexual privileges. Give up on the in-between. The QUEER revolution for which we hope and work -- in which one can be both/and -- is still very much a work in progress. Especially for women.

There are always some who want to make this an issue of "mutual respect." But there can't be "mutuality" when power structures remain unbalanced. Equality can't exist before equity.

I don't need to and won't further entitle with my individual respect those who are already privileged. If they really are as "woke" as they claim to be, they need to go out of their way, do their work, examine their consciences, acknowledge societal structures of power, and privilege MY queer life and relationship. This is not a two-way street in which everyone starts from the same starting line. That's the ideal for which we are still fighting.

Words alone can be painfully empty. Friends, siblings, children too often merely perform their "wokeness" for those of us who are gender queer. And it's when the rubber hits the road -- when your long-term partner is ill and enmeshed with the medical establishment for their survival -- that the depths of this performance really matters. And blessedly, on the professional end -- thanks in large part to the too many who lost their lives to AIDS -- this performance has really changed.

I am grateful for that.

So Happy Pride. I hope you all will join me in continuing to fight like hell.

#happypride
#fightlikehell
#queerwomen
#lesbian 
#misogynystillexists
#EndThePatriarchy