PRIDE IS UNDER THREAT. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN FOR YOU THIS YEAR?
Open Wide for Pride: In Defense of Throat Shoving
On Pride and passive-aggressive queerphobes
Recently, Amber Poe published a piece on Prism & Pen entitled Transphobes: No One Is Shoving Pride Month Down Your Throat. It’s an eloquent and lovely piece which echoes the views of many queer commenters today, and I highly recommend you read it. While I enjoyed her piece; frankly it’s sentiment that I have heard many times within the community. I would like to offer an alternate and contrary viewpoint.
Poe’s piece is written to address a response to a previous post about upcoming Pride events. Poe received the following response:
It’s not those that chose to live their lives within this movement I’m against. It’s the push of it down everyone’s throats that I’m against. Do whatever makes you happy, just don’t try and force people to celebrate you because of it…but you can’t march around wearing weird costumes and screaming into bullhorns and waving stupid flags and then say ‘it’s none of your business’.
Poe then notes:
You know what I love about that comment? It’s so passive-aggressive trying to be PC yet essentially still bashing the LGBTQ+ community. I have some news for you, transphobe…NO ONE IS FORCING ANYTHING DOWN YOUR THROAT.
She’s right to point out that the commenter is highly passive-aggressive — as are most queer-phobes. However, I’d argue she’s incorrect in asserting nothing is being “forced down anyone’s throat.” The act of Pride: the celebration of Pride is a performative act calling forth change.
The earliest Pride marches and celebrations were defiant acts of visibility and solidarity. They were, and remain, a visible demonstration to cis heteronormative culture that We (the LGBTQ+ community) exist. Reminding them that though they continue to spend enormous efforts in legislation, policies, policing, and propaganda to erase us, to dismiss us as mentally ill, to make us hide in shame, that We continue to exist unashamedly. That We will not ‘go gentle into the night’, but will rage for our acceptance as full citizens and human beings.
The first celebration of Pride was not a riot, but the commemoration and celebration of a riot against injustice and a demand for recognition. Within our marches and celebrations we are defiantly reminding people that We exist. That their simplistic, narrow, views of gender and sexuality do not, and cannot, contain all potentials of human experience or existence. It is our existence that We are shoving down their throats. A lived existence that forces them to confront their naive and solipsistic views of the world they live in.
I have never considered myself a radical. I have always thought of myself as a deeply thoughtful moderate — so much so it is frequently difficult to commit to a single idea or position on paper. Yet, there is an old saying: Being Gay or Queer is a revolutionary act in itself — or to quote the original manifesto:
That everyday you wake up alive, relatively happy, and a functioning human being, you are committing a rebellious act. You as an alive and functioning queer are a revolutionary.
It is past time that queer people stopped believing that we can courteously coexist with those who would seek to erase us. It is time to stop the facade that we are not ‘shoving our queerness down their throats’. Every queer couple which holds hands in public, every gay or lesbian marriage, every trans person who cannot or refuses to try to stealth their way through society, and every parent who lets their AMAB child dress as a princess shoves some aspect of our queerness down the throat of straight society. It is our right — and our duty — to do so — not simply for ourselves, or our brothers and sisters, but for the next child who grows up feeling different attractions, feeling trapped by their body or the crushing gendered expectations placed upon them.
If it stops a single child from feeling ostracized, isolated, and ashamed of being attracted to a same-sex friend or feeling they’d rather be treated as a boy than a girl, I will gladly don heavy leather work gloves, slip on my 5" heels and grab a plunger and start shoving.
Open wide!
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt, Pride Is Under Threat. What Does That Mean for You This Year?
Show your Pride and read other brilliant responses here:
