Gay pride parades and festivals—which occur by the hundreds in June and July—are rapidly upon us. This year, gay anti-Trump activists around the United States are planning a “million gay” anti-Trump march, the Equality March, on June 11 in Washington DC, when the city holds its local Pride Festival.
Such a gay march on Washington has not occurred since 2000, when there was a “Millennium March,” and before that in 1993, when at least 300,000 gays marched, addressed by gay friends and appointees of President Bill Clinton and his administration. Those of us who were there remember that streets in the then-D.C. gayborhood, Dupont Circle, as well as areas in downtown D.C. between Dupont and the National Mall, were impassable to vehicular traffic, including public bus service. Out-of-town Pride celebrants took over the streets on a sparkling, sunny day with temperatures in the mid-70s.
Gay Pride Parades Usually Support Free Expression
Gay Pride festivals and marches are usually free-speech, or more accurately, free-expression zones. Near nudity is common (or in San Francisco, actual nudity is). In somewhat more “conservative” D.C., I remember watching the parade with an A-list, “power lesbian” acquaintance, a trade lobbyist who sits on the board of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund. My bright, somewhat free-market-oriented lesbian friend, along with her two bright and beautiful kids (actual offspring of a donor at the famous Nobel Laureate sperm bank), watched the parade together.
We saw a woman dressed as a purple caterpillar marching in the parade, complete with the deely-bopper insect antennae popular a few years ago. I kept watching this caterpillar woman without thinking about it, before finally realizing that I was trying to ascertain not just what a caterpillar had to do with the Pride march, but how her costume was constructed.
Once I focused on her, I realized it was not exactly the costume I had imagined. She was wearing purple deely-boppers, purple body paint, a purple thong, and purple flip flops. What I had taken to be a caterpillar costume were rolls of fat and sagging breasts. She was naked, except for the purple body paint. I hoped the children did not notice, and luckily, I don’t think they did. Her painted flab was its own camouflage.
In D.C., the gay Pride parade is one weekend day and the gay Pride festival—with music, speakers, food vendors, outdoor booths, and exhibits—is the next. The groups represented by booths include Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and gays from pretty much every religious—and anti-religious—group you can imagine. I’m not sure that a viewpoint has ever been “rejected” at D.C. Pride (where a booth sets any group back $400+), though gay 2nd Amendment advocates and libertarians were banned in 2015 from the Olympia, Washington festival.
But this year’s different.
A Right-Leaning Volunteer Was Just Banned
Capitol Pride, the group that runs the D.C. Pride festival, has just banned a volunteer because of something he wrote at the conservative website RedState last year.
Bryan Pruitt suggested in his prescient May 2016 article that Hillary and the Democrats would lose the election because the Democratic Party and the Obama Justice Department were intent on a range of allegedly “pro-LGBT” policies—from bankrupting businesses that do not want to participate in gay weddings, to forcing schools and other institutions to give students the right to use any locker room, shower, or bathroom they feel is appropriate to their wished-for gender. Some transsexual “queer people of color” demanded that Pruitt be banned from Pride, or at least from doing any volunteer work on it.
Rush Limbaugh was the first person (outside of the libertarian or conservative gay communities, at least) to observe that so much of the “gay agenda” has been achieved—with gay marriage legal and gays serving in the military (the D.C. Pride festival features several booths run by gay CIA and FBI agents)—that the gay political class and its lucrative fundraising engine has little reason to exist anymore. For the past year, they could function as a component of the Hillary’s presidential campaign. But for the long haul, they needed to find a new cause around which they could legislate, litigate, and above all, raise funds. For now, transsexuals are the answer.
No one wants transsexuals (or anyone else) to be bullied or to have their rights abrogated. But neither they, nor we gays, nor anyone else, has the right to be approved of and celebrated by everyone we meet.
What’s more, transsexuals and gays don’t actually have that much in common—beyond being “sexual minorities.” Gay men (and maybe even lesbians) have always rather… enjoyed… single-sex showers and locker rooms. Some lesbians worry that a government-funded therapeutic state is now snatching up young sporty girls who were probably going to grow up to be lesbians and instead indoctrinating them with the idea that they are males trapped in female bodies, needing hormonal and surgical interventions the therapeutic state will happily provide—and in the process, creating more tax-funded jobs for Democrats with approved views about gender.
Gay Libertarians Oppose Total Liberal Hegemony
The alternative would be school choice, where parents of a bullied child could send their little girl to an all girl’s school, perhaps for athletic girls, or send their little boy to an artsy school for future theater majors, where they would not come home with black eyes and suicidal thoughts. No one would have to be lectured about correct thinking about sexuality. But this solution would reduce union dues to the National Education Association and thus NEA donations to Democrats.
The left has to hope it can achieve total hegemony before its nonsensical civil rights paradigm collapses. Lesbians, transgenders, and gays have only a limited amount in common, and often have competing interests—whether it is a gay law school professor suing to end women-only showings of Wonder Woman, or transgender “women” demanding access to the Michigan Women’s Music Festival and other women-only events. It’s almost as nutty as the idea of “people of color,” where Asian-Americans, the wealthiest demographic groups (Indians having displaced Jews and Episcopalians some years ago), African-Americans, and Hispanic immigrants are lumped together as an “interest group.”
The current civil rights paradigm is papier-mâché virtue signaling, leaving African Americans in poverty and de facto segregated schools, while threatening to end any innovation from charter schools for inner-city blacks and retirement communities for gays. But it does create jobs for middle and upper middle class (often white) lobbyists and bureaucrats. So the premise of the civil rights paradigm—that most Americans are guilty of racism, etc. and thus deserve to give up their freedom of association, their individual rights, and their wealth to an ever-expanding State—must be defended by “liberals” at all cost.
Will Intersectionality Divide And Legislate Gay Pride?
The Millennium March became the target of an FBI probe, after $750,000 collected in fees from participants disappeared. On occasion, a journalist covering events for the gay press will note how often gay and AIDS events and organizations end up in the red, or how often staffers are tried for embezzlement. So one must wonder about “above board” members of the gay political class as well: are they in it for the money, and is Rush correct that transsexuals are just the new produce they are selling? And are transsexuals and queer people of color truly offended by Mr. Pruitt’s election predictions—or are they just trying to silence other people’s opinions?
This year, they have a list of “intersectional” demands: namely, that “queer people of color” be given control of all gay pride events (whether they worked on them or raised funds for them or not), and that police (including the D.C. Gay and Lesbian police unit) and corporate funders like Wells Fargo bank be excluded.
There are already a growing number of separate gay pride events—black pride, latino pride, trans pride, youth pride—around the country. The people who want to take over D.C.’s annual gay pride parade and fuse it with an anti-Trump march don’t want their own event. One fears they want to take over an event they didn’t organize or fund, ban people who disagree with their agenda, and hector (or re-educate) those who still attend.
Democrats Think These Parades Are About Them
One could easily think this is just the latest example of the Democratic Party serpent eating its own tail, as when the Clintonworld Democratic establishment alienated the left of their party by rigging the primaries against socialist Bernie Sanders.
But the queer Trotskyists of color actually have their fingers on a real issue. The gay political class, from Hillary Rosen on down, does consist of members and flunkies of the Democratic Party establishment, and they do “rig” the gay community and its political activities. For years, I’ve videoed the D.C. Pride March and published it on YouTube. The parade lineup is always the same: first is whomever is mayor, perpetual Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton tottering on arthritic hips that should have been term limited into a recliner, and members of the City Council; second are corporate sponsors and bar floats with semi-naked boys, dancing, wearing only body oil, sunglasses, glitter, and speedos; shunted to the rear are Asian transvestites and transsexuals and black gay Baptists.
In the past, I’ve asked about this and was told by Capitol Pride organizers and volunteers that it had to be that way. If Norton, etc. are not allowed to be first, they won’t show up.
The gay establishment has struck back against its critics. Rick Rosendall—leader of the small but politically-connected Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance, and columnist for the Washington Blade, the gay Democratic Party establishment paper—writes, “…(T)he attack on D.C.’s Capital Pride by radicals … while extreme, are not the biggest problem the controversy reveals. In the name of queers, trans folk, and people of color, radicals employ an abusive tone that demands rather than engages. Even those who have long worked productively across lines of race, religion, and gender identity are treated as collaborators with the enemy if we object to unrepresentative zealots packing a meeting to take over a community-based organization.”
(Full disclosure: Rosendall and I are frenemies; in the 80s, I was a member of GLAA; and some years ago, I received a bad rating from them when I ran for office as a Libertarian, even though I was the only gay candidate in my race, because of my “ideological distrust of government.”)
Who Will Rule This Year’s Capitol Pride Parade?
Why have these “queer people of color” never spoken up before and advocated that the politically-connected and powerful, and those not-so-connected and empowered, be randomly distributed in the Pride march? Is it because the cultural degeneration of the left into fascism, censorship, and victimology has simply reached its zenith? Or has the rise of new media (on the left) allowed actual leftists to realize how they’ve been played and duped by the Democratic Party establishment? Maybe both.
Will the national anti-Trump Pride march fizzle as the intersectionality activists turn off the drunk naked boys and girls too poor to go to the beach in Provincetown or Rehoboth this coming weekend, who are the bulk of the sun worshippers who attend Capitol Pride? If they do manage to ban police from the event, will we see Antifa-style violence of the kind that was featured at earlier anti-Trump rallies in D.C.?
Stay tuned.
