CHRISTOPHER STEVENS | 7.2.2008
I HIKED in south Georgia recently with a group of friends and a Young Man Of Great Promise who has since sorely disappointed me. (What are promises for, after all? But that is a topic for another day.)
The YMOGP and I had worn whimsical plush tails for the occasion. This was just the sort of thing that had endeared the YMOGP to me, being partial to a nice fluffy tail myself, and I was tickled that he just decided to wear it as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and went waltzing into a hick-town gas station with it.
Another of the group saw it differently.
“I admire his bravery and his being whimsical,” he said later, “but it’s guys like that who then wonder why a bunch of hicks beat them up. Why bring that kind of attention to yourself? In Midtown, sure! But down there? And then they wonder ‘Why?’”
I couldn’t disagree more. (That jingling sound you hear is me saddling up my high horse.) I mean, the immediate ‘why’ is obvious; you've done something mildly freakish in the white bread heartland. The deeper ‘why’ of such a reaction (violence) will never be cured if it's never challenged. It's not a question of wanting attention; it's doing what pleases you and expecting — or at least hoping for — the courtesy of being left alone by people to whom you've done absolutely nothing.
The really troubling part is that, even in town, the people who should be most in tune with the right to be different (you, homos) would be far from last to titter at and shun us for doing something fun and harmless. So many are all comfy in their little urban bubble of tenuous tolerance, willfully ignorant of the fact that it was people acting out in all sorts of ‘attention-getting, unacceptable’ ways that won them the little bit of acceptance they've got.
“Whoa, Nelly,” you cry (and I don’t even flinch), “I agree that conformity must be challenged; I just question the places you choose to do it. If there’s no tolerance in Midtown, why expect it elsewhere? Is a purple faux-fur tail worth getting killed for?”
Lest you think that last bit a tad melodramatic, consider that Matthew Shepard died not all that long ago, and that, closer to home, Tennessee had 56 reported anti-gay hate crimes last year.
In any fight for good, anywhere, someone has to take the risk of being first. The thing is, people took that risk 40 years ago (More, actually. There were acts of rebellion by homosexuals before Stonewall, people.), and we’re still living with the some of the same fear.
It’s grotesque. Someone really ought to do something about it.
Which brings me to pride, which is a party when we still need protest, a parade when we still need a march. The problem with Pride, as I told another friend, is that the individuals involved (if they can be called either individual or involved) take themselves too seriously, and the event itself too lightly, celebrating incomplete and tenuously granted rights as if we were, y’know, equal or something, when we can't even treat each other as equals.
I'm really appalled that a movement that was all about individual rights, about liberation, and respect for the margins, has devolved into an urge to conform for the sake of the right to conform even more (i.e., to get married), and anyone who doesn't look like the ads for the movement's corporate sponsors (cookie-cutter gym beauties who wash down boner pills and HIV meds with Bacardi) is once again outcast.
And so we parade proudly down Peachtree Street. We wave to the crowd, we smile at the cameras. “Look at us,” we say, “Ignore the drag queens and the leather men, and look at us. If you give us the right to be ourselves, we will make ourselves just like you. If you don’t hurt us, we will make ourselves so equal, we won’t even need to be proud.”
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