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Can someone steelman why “pride” is still necessary? Seems that you can be gay, bi or trans and it’s more than accepted - there’s a huge increase in kids claiming lgbt status so if there’s stigma it’s not apparent anymore. At what point does it make sense to call a moratorium for social movements that have lost their purpose? What are the “victory conditions” for what homophobia is considered no longer a major issue?
Seconding @4bpp above.
But also and entirely completely: It's Fun. I have fun there. Many people have fun there. It's a big trashy street party where you drink and have fun. I'm straight, but I don't have a stick up my ass about it, I go there and have a great time. On occasion my wife has met a nice girl there and we have had a fantastic time. You drink, there's a parade, there's dancing, there's smoking, there's sex, there's music, there's a sense of occasion and togetherness.
And for the most part, there are absolutely no qualifications to participate. Queer culture's long running effort to be inclusive, just now starting to trim itself, has welcomed straight outcasts as "Allies" if they simply didn't hate Queers. So many people who need something to do, can find it. Where Christians tend to be initially open but eventually get sticky about the Baptism thing.
One of my goals for the upcoming year is to have more days of occasion. I want to find local Catholic sites that it would be practical to pilgrimage on foot. I want to celebrate things.
That's the main thing. As long as people are having fun at Pride, Pride will self-perpetuate.
And corporations, as @astraganant points out, will find ways to stick their blood funnel into it and turn that fun into consumption.
It sounds like Mardi Gras with a few exceptions:
I don’t think (could be wrong) people believe it is acceptable to bring kids to Mardi Gras.
If someone publicly objected to Mardi Gras, they wouldn’t be fired and ostracized from polite society.
Idk, there are definitely kid friendly Mardi gras/faschtnacht day celebrations I recall going to.
Cancel culture might be a side effect of Pride, but it isn't why Pride exists. Assuming your opponents do things out of purely malevolent intentions tends to leads to big blindspots, most people do things because they enjoy them or believe them to be good.
This is making me think of the cavalier-Roundhead cultural and ultimately civil war in England. The cavaliers parodied the roundheads as joyless puritans who wanted to destroy "merry England" and at different times very much used procedures to make the Book of Sports legally mandatory fun.
Is Fasnacht all that spicy? Some bizarre imagery and some grotesque caricatures, but not really Love Parade circa '99 (RIP). More of a colorful brass instrument party that occasionally invites itself into your pub, killing any attempts at conversation without yelling.
It's not spicy at all, which is kind of my point. We have the same holiday, Fat Tuesday/Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras/Fastnacht Day that are all the day before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, for the purpose of celebrating and feasting immediately prior to the period of fasting when celebration and drinking would be inappropriate; and it is celebrated in different ways across places and cultures and times. And even within the same overall "culture" of American Catholicism, you have N'Orleans Mardi Gras which I understand that you would emphatically not attend with children, and you have Fastnacht day in PA which I mostly associate with going to the local bank branch with my mother to get a free donut.*
In the same way, OP and others seem to be conflating leather daddies in the Castro with Target selling rainbow T shirts with blood sucking corporate law firms handing out "Dewey Cheatham and Howe LLP Ally" Stickers. Those are all under the heading of Pridetm but they are very different things. Just as my parents taking me to get a donut at Local Bank doesn't mean that either my parents or Local Bank endorse young women flashing their breasts for beads in Louisiana, it just means they endorse donuts; similarly parents getting their kids a rainbow lollypop at Local Bank doesn't really mean that the parents or the bank endorse capital-P-Perversion, it means they endorse rainbow lollypops for kids.
Now I understand the deeper questions of "Where do we draw the line?" or "How slippery is the slope?" or a general question of buying into a complete cultural package from the biggest to the smallest aspect. But to ask the question "Why is Pride around anymore?" and not acknowledge that part of the answer is "People enjoy it" is kinda silly.
*Seriously, they were so good. I still remember getting a warm donut in the bank lobby, spreading it with cinnamon sugar butter. It's such a shame the Canucks came in and bought that bank.
Sure, but there's a major difference, in that drunkenness and sexual debauchery are not a central, or even licit part of Catholicism, while gay sex is central to gay sexual identities, and things like BDSM are all explicitly celebrated under the umbrella of Pride.
The analogy of "Target selling kids rainbow shirts is different from the gay sex" to "Mardis Gras debauchery is different from Catholicism and Lent" doesn't really hold up.
In fact it's the opposite. One is a family-friendly expression of a concept that is centrally about adult sexuality, while the other is a debaucherously expression of a concept which is explicitly chaste.
Sure, but handing out a Fastnacht also doesn't imply that you endorse many concepts central to Catholicism. I strongly doubt that even the coincidentally Catholic employees of Local Bank thought of themselves as taking a position on the trinity, on transubstantiation, on papal supremacy, on the ultimate fate of heretics and non-believers. I would bet a significant number of people eating those fastnachts would disagree, strenuously, with those points of Catholic doctrine.
You're arguing for sexuality as a special zone of inappropriate discussion in public, that nothing even second-hand associated with sex can be discussed in public. Which is fine, but it is clearly not a broadly held belief. It rings hollow to me as a universal principle.
I'm not arguing for anything here, it's that it's the relevant dimension here, and the comparison to other secular festivals is different on this specific ground. To equate Pride with them, is a game of hide the pickle.
Break out the template by it's components, the "Holiday Festival" starter kit, from the inside out:
The core concept
The values, priorities and value-system embodied by the concept
A particular instance, example, or memorial of the concept forming the holiday
Pious observance of the holiday
Secular celebration and festivities connected to or an outgrowth from the holiday
'Spicy', 'Adult', or 'inappropriate' takes on and circumstances of indulgence in the festivities.
Take Mardi-gras:
Catholicism
Catholic morality, esp. pray, fasting, and alms-giving
The Beginning of Lent
Shrove Tuesday traditions
Mardi-Gras
Drunken carousing, partying, sex, and nudity.
4th of July:
America
American Patriotism & Democracy
The signing of the Declaration of Independence
Patriotic Displays, memorials, Bank holiday, etc.
Picnics, parades, fireworks, boating at the lake.
Adult parties with booze, etc.
In both of these instances, (and many more), one might criticize the inappropriateness of them on account of 6, or be specifically upset by children being around too much 6. And, like you have done here, we can rebut that the adult themes in 6, are not central or even necessarily relevant to 1-5. Neither does partaking in or exposing kids to 5, imply any sort of approval or support for 6.
But this doesn't work with Pride because adult themes are central to #1 and #2. There is no instance of 4 or 5 that is divorced from themes of sex and sexuality or divorced from values of sexual liberalism.
And while some things in bucket 6 like boozing, nudity, or sleeping around are not central to PRIDE, they are not nearly so divorced or in contradiction with the core themes as in other holidays, secular and religious. Acceptance of sexual liberalism, breaking of taboos and social mores, and celebration of eroticism are a core component of PRIDE, not tacked on or in tension with.
While there are plenty of prude, chaste, and modest LGBT members, perhaps even most of them, PRIDE itself is not remotely about integrating same-sex into heteronormative forms of disgression.
Pride is about sex and is adult themed. You can accuse me of wanting to specially zone that out of public modesty, but it's the opposite, you need to defend PRIDE's special and unique inclusion of it, and comparisons to other, non-sexually themed holidays are a motte and baily.
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