LGBTQIA PRIDE? PROUD OF WHAT?

I have my own personal rituals. I am somewhat obsessive-compulsive by nature. I straighten pictures. I cannot leave my kitchen after using it without wiping things down. I clean the house from top to bottom once a week. That's just me.

My upbringing in an ethnic working-class Roman/Orthodox Catholic subculture was centered on rituals. Weekly mass. Training as an altar boy. Family rituals as well. Birthdays, holiday picnics, etc..Life was grindingly predictable. I think it was compensation for the impoverished unpredictability of both my parents' Great Depression childhoods.

This month's rituals of LGBTQIA Pride around the U.S. will be the usual carnivals of outrageous costumes, interspersed with banners of local politically correct church groups. A parade and a show, a tradition. But does it really deserve its invented title, "Pride"?

I felt that early Gay Pride marches, which were the beginnings of today's mega-parades, were aptly named by the few lesbian-gay politicos who arranged them. I marched in Boston's first, and many more over the years. That first march was a demonstration, patterned on the civil-rights marches of southern African-Americans in the 1960's.

We walked down Charles Street at the foot of Beacon Hill, as I recall. It was an informal demonstration, a quiet and tense situation. Maybe a couple of hundred of us, mostly gay men. Some were on roller skates. Onlookers gaped at us from the sidewalks. Slurs were shouted, and some young toughs from South Boston, as I recall, threw beer bottles and a loosened sidewalk brick at us.

Some Boston policemen had been assigned to the indignity of observing the event. They were the typical Boston Irish cops whose noses were definitely out of joint. I saw one crack a smile as a beer bottle whizzed by my head. I fought an impulse to run into the crowd to beat on the creeps who were harassing us. I knew I would probably be the one to get arrested.

I remember how exuberant we were when it ended. We had accomplished something momentous in this stodgy Catholic city. The news media covered the event minimally, but the word was out there. We existed as a definable group in the light of day. We did not have to be alone. That was almost 50 years ago. 

The Pride ritual has become a display of extremism in many ways. As with most tolerated extremism, megalomania is not far behind. Bullying "the other" into accepting all your outrageous flaws or extreme ideology can come from successfully intimidating seemingly passive observers. The normies, as some fringy activists call them, might actually be forced to think and speak a certain way in the minds of the intoxicated bullies.

There is no pride in being a bully. Bullies are motivated by fear and self-loathing. Mobs of bullies are comparable to abandoned dogs who naturally form wild packs for security and more effective hunting of large prey.

The "pride", raising our chins and walking together in broad daylight, of early marches was not meant to shock or bully. But today's Pride has turned into garrish exhibitionism. The signing on of liquor producers, banks and insurance companies belies the real emphasis of today's Pride events. That is marketing. Selling the entitlement ideology of the extremists is oddly mixed with selling the mundane to the homosexual population, known for its childless prosperity and materialism. The ancient Roman bread-and-circus gimmick still works.

But is there any reason to be proud of all the narcissistic anguish and dysfunction of the woke LGBTQIA establishment today? I think not. There is more reason, as a crusader for gay rights, to be angry and disappointed. 

We are twenty years beyond the peak devastation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the U.S.. An entire generation if gay men have been born and raised since then. They are the hope of the gay male subculture. As they emerge from higher education and into the workplaces of America, I hope they will assert their rational influence upon the woke madness of the current LGBTQIA establishment. 

This is asking a lot of them, I will admit. They have been raised around this confused lesbian-transgender-dominated rainbow ideology. 

They have been told Islam, which is an ideology called upon by those who stone and behead gay men, is good, but White men are universally bad. They have been told that the Black population, one of the most homophobic towards gay men, is all good, but the middle-class White population, one of the most liberal and accepting of gay men, is all bad. They have been told marriage is good, but male sexuality is bad. They have been told joining the military is good, but that masculinity is toxic. 

There is hope. Young gay men in their twenties are emerging in media to challenge this racist and sexist woke insanity. I am sure their numbers will grow. Another example for optimism is the #WalkAway movement of young gay men who are turning away from the Democrats, who have pandered to wokeness as a cynical way of harnessing political power. Divide and conquer, another ancient tactic. Candidate Buttigieg's mixed reception by the political gay male community speaks to this. 

To young gay men, I would say I am not a proud gay man. I am a liberated gay man. And my liberation has included my liberation from ideologies. I have worked hard to liberate myself from religious dogma. I have worked hard to liberate myself from my ethnic working-class resentments, which pushed me towards unrealistic socialist ideals. I have worked hard to integrate my masculinity with my homosexual identity, thereby liberating myself from society's expectations of who and how I should be. 

I am proud of nothing I see in today's LGBTQIA establishment. I am impressed by the few vocal gay men who are standing up to its nonsense in media. Their mission will be difficult. Fighting the mob always is, as we of the Stonewall Generation know all too well, but it is the only true way forward.