On Pride: A Speech (from a Cis Straight Guy) to its Religious Despisers

1.

A couple of weekends ago, I went to the Columbus Gay Pride Parade.  The main parade route goes up High Street, and I live a couple blocks from High, so I gathered the folding chairs and walked to the parade route to reserve a spot for myself, my fiancé, and some friends.

You will likely be surprised to learn that Columbus, Ohio has one of the largest gay pride parades in the country.  Stonewall Columbus announced a total attendance (participants and spectators) of 700,000 people.  I am not sure how they calculate that beyond a basic estimate, but the actual parade portion took close to three hours to fully pass by our location toward the end of the route, so I have no reason to doubt the big picture number.  To be fully transparent, I don't have three hours of parade in me, no matter the content or circumstances, so we abandoned ship around the 2:45 mark.  Plus, I had ribs to cook for dinner, and anyone who has done that knows it is a lengthy process.

I saw about 50 drag performers of various sorts, and maybe two dozen people wearing leather dog masks.  The remaining, overwhelming majority of the parade offerings were notable for their ubiquity.  The bulk of the floats were from the most mundane of organizations you can imagine--banks and insurance companies and medical providers.  Ohio State brought Brutus the Buckeye, the iconic mascot that you will see on the sidelines of football games, doing his sideline-at-football-games thing.  Local politicians, or at least Democratic ones, made appearances.  About three dozen churches and synagogues, including the one I attend, participated.  Interspersed with the prosaic were some more whimsical offerings--I laughed a bit too loud at the high-school band style flag team proudly named "The Flaggots."  But by and large, it really was a very large, more colorful version of a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade that you could find anywhere, under any set of circumstances.

Indeed, the primary take away I had from the event was how joyful it was.  These are not necessarily the most joyful times to be LGBTQ, in the country as a whole or in Ohio.  And yet, that fear and anger seemed to be on the periphery of things.  The event was a statement, but a statement of joy and positivity.  It felt like the people there were declaring the commitment to maintaining joy despite the political winds.

It was a very fun time, I must say.

2.

You have to learn how to sleep with someone.  When I say "sleep with someone," I don't mean it as a euphemism for sex; I mean the simple fact of lying in a bed with another person and attempting to get your nightly rest.  The first night I slept in the same bed with Danielle, I slept terribly, because I was constantly aware of this other person next to me, and that awareness kept me from settling into a restful sleep (that, and several visits from Danielle's cat, who was confused as to this new person lying next to his mom).  I had to learn how to be in the bed with her, and she had to learn the same with me.  I have a tendency to hog the covers; she sets up shop in the middle of the bed to try to get closer to me.  There is a dance to the whole thing, one you have to learn via a couple of nights of bad sleep. 

Having now learned how to sleep with someone, there is a profound intimacy that can be found here.  The process of falling asleep and waking up next to a person is a real blessing.  That process of falling asleep and waking up builds a rhythm of life together.  It takes you out of the mode of "dating," in the sense of a series of discrete, finite encounters, and into something that is structural to the way you live your life.  Being with someone stops being something that you do and becomes something that just is, and that is a radical paradigm shift.  There are certainly other things besides sleeping in the same bed that can and do mark that transition, but for me the sleeping thing was the most obvious and the most profound.

Why is sleeping with someone such a big deal?  I think the answer is that when we sleep, we are vulnerable.  All of our defenses, all of our attempts to present ourselves in a particular way go away when we fall asleep.  It is just you, as you are, without any ability to present yourself in a way that you think will be palatable to others.  One of my favorite parts of sleeping in the bed with Danielle is that moment when I wake up and roll over to see her still asleep.  It is just her, as she is.  She has chosen to allow me to see her in that unfiltered way.  Being allowed to experience that vulnerability builds and deepens the intimacy.  Without the vulnerability, genuine intimacy is impossible.

The older I get and the more I am around, the more I believe that intimacy is far, far more fundamental to the human experience than sex.  I mean, sex is great, but it is absolutely possible to live a fulfilling life in which you do not engage ins sexual acts.  What I don't think is possible is to live a fulfilling life in which you do not have intimacy with other people.  Intimacy has levels, and so I don't think it is absolutely necessary to  have a dedicated partner in order to experience intimacy, but you are definitely living life on hard mode without one.  My life and my happiness have improved significantly in the last two years, not primarily because of increased sex but because of increased intimacy.  I get to sleep in a bed next to someone, and that makes me feel fulfilled in a way that I didn't feel before.

3.

The rhetorical move that conservative opponents make in opposition to all things LGBTQ is to try to reduce it to sex, or in the case of the "T" to genitals and genital status.  The logic here is pretty clear.  If you can frame what is going on as a demand for unrestrained sexual license, you can marginalize the demands, because the follow on is "and no one is going to die from being denied the ability to have sex in a particular way."  Armed with that framing, the anti-LGBTQ position seems more reasonable, and something like Pride parades turn into bacchanalias.  

The problem here is two fold.  First, the conservative rhetoric is rendered utterly hypocritical by then turning around and elevating, and even fetishizing, straight sex and procreation into a borderline fertility cult that pervades modern conservative Christianity.  Sorry folks, but you can't have it both ways, where sex doesn't matter for these people but matters to the highest degree for those people.  But the real problem is that the framing simply does not (IME) describe what is really going on with the LGBTQ movement.  The fundamental assertion at the heart of Pride, it seems to me, is for the participant to be seen as that person really is.  And that demand matters because it is the foundation, or maybe better the prerequisite, for intimacy with another person.  

The anti-LGBTQ movement asserts, intentionally or unintentionally, that these people need to mask who they are all the time.  No one can see what you are like with all the defenses and filters turned off, they demand.  It's not really a demand to forego sex but to forego intimacy, or even the possibility of intimacy.  It is a cruel, harsh, and indeed inhuman, demand.  And Pride parades are the manifestation of the reasonable rejection of that demand. "I deserve to be seen as I am" is a universal human assertion, not special pleading on behalf of an entitled minority.  In a world where such consideration was provided as a matter of course, a parade would not be necessary.  But such consideration is not provided as a matter of course, and the most prominent folks not providing the consideration are you, the conservative Christian.

So, there is a way in which Pride parades are about giving the finger directly to conservative Christians.  If you are feeling attacked from the existence of a Pride parade, I would respectfully ask yourself how it would feel to be told that you must hide who you are, from everyone, for the rest of your life.  That you, in contrast to everyone else, shouldn't get to experience human intimacy.  And imagine how peeved you would be at the people telling you this.

4.

But there is another thing.  The longer I get away from it, the more I realize that I have experienced something pretty unique.  I am one of the few people to have had the chance to observe first-hand the world's most thorough-going institutionalized closet, without having been in said closet.  Most of the people who have seen what I have seen have staked their identity on the structure of the closet, and so can't look at it objectively.  

Having had this experience, I can speak with confidence on one point--if you care about the welfare of the people involved, there can be no doubt that living openly, living with "Pride" if you will, is better for them than the alternative.  People who live with Pride flourish at basically the same rate and in the same ways as everyone else, whereas the other way leads to (IME) uniform misery and dysfunctionality.  Indeed, the people in the closet that are the healthiest are the ones who have long-term partners; the best adjusted Roman Catholic priests are the ones who follow the rules the least.  If you care at all about empirical evidence, or the believe in any way in the principle that "a good tree bears good fruit," then this is not a close call.  In fact, I think it is so clear that anyone who actually looks at the examples and compares them fairly will come to the same conclusion.

The qualifier here, of course, is the "if you care about the welfare of the people involved" part.  It is clear that many of the folks on the other side of this equation don't actually care about the people involved--those people are are tool to enforce either an ideological agenda or a personal agenda.  Some people believe that the welfare of LGBTQ people is less important than the advancement and imposition of a particular ideological vision on society, and what that agenda might mean for those people and their lives ultimately doesn't matter.  The more honest of the trads will admit this, but I must say that those those honest ones are in the minority.  And then there are people who simply want to see other people suffer--as has been said in many contexts in connection with the Former President and his allies, the cruelty is the point.

For me, I cannot accept either of these positions.  The cruelty brigade are mentally and morally deficient.  A Christianity that requires, or even allows, wishing harm to other people is monstrous and unworthy of belief.  Sorry not sorry.

As to the others, even if I believed in the postulated end result stemming from that vision of society, the fact that it would be built on the misery and pain of these people disqualifies it from consideration in my book.  It has become almost cliche to draw this parallel, but the best case scenario of the conservative vision is the one set forth in Ursula Le Guin's short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.  And that's assuming they're right, assuming it all works, a proposition for which the evidence is very, very thin.  No, I can't accept that.

I would ask anyone who is reading this who is opposed to something like Pride to take a moment to be honest with yourself--do you care about the human flourishing of the people who identify as LGBTQ?  If the answer is "no," or even "not if it gets in the way of my theological commitments," then OK---I don't really have much in the way of anything to say.  But if you do (and I know some of you genuinely, sincerely do), then I would ask you to take seriously what I am saying here.  This framework of life you are proposing for these folks doesn't work.  It makes them miserable; in many cases it is killing them, directly or indirectly.  I know you think that you have to advocate for this because of your other theological commitments, but you can't look away from the outcomes here.  It can't be a good tree if it is producing fruit this bad.  And, please trust me--the fruit is all the way rotten.

5.

If I may, I think you know all of this deep down.  The discomfort you feel around this issue is not because Pride parades are "throwing it in your face."  It's because you know that the system you are relying on is not reflecting reality, at least as to this issue.  I understand how dislocating and threatening that possibility is for you.  I really do, and I am not trying to minimize that.  But the solution to this cannot be found in transforming this angst about your theology and its place in the world into a weapon to be used against people who are just trying to live their lives in peace and with integrity.  You would not accept that course of action in any other context, and you shouldn't in this context as well.

I don't hate you, and I don't think you are evil people, or at least not the bulk of you.  And those folks in the parade don't hate you either, not really.  But you are wrong and they are right, and I for one respect the religious and spiritual project that you are engaged in to tell you this directly and honestly.  I cannot tell you how to reconcile the conflict this creates with your theology.  But I know that it is not through trying to shut down and silence the public expression of those people who bring the problem into focus.  You are going to have to find another way.  And not just for them, but for you as well.