This was published last week at The Federalist.
Gay Pride parades and festivals - hundreds of which occur around the country and the world in June and July - are rapidly upon us. This year a a mega-Pride is also planned, the Equality March, as gay anti-Trump activists around the country are planning a "million gay" anti-Trump march on Washington, D.C., to occur on June 11 when D.C. holds its own local Pride Festival. Such a gay march on Washington has not occurred since 2000, when there was a "Millennium March," and before that in 1993, when at least 300,000 gays did so march, addressed by David Mixner and other gay friends and appointees of President Bill Clinton and his administration. Those of us who were there will remember that streets in the then D.C. gayborhood, Dupont Circle, and the areas in downtown D.C. between Dupont and the National Mall, were impassable to vehicular traffic, including public bus service, as out of town Pride celebrants took over the streets on a sparkling, sunny day with temperatures in the mid-70s.
Gay Pride parades and festivals - hundreds of which occur around the country and the world in June and July - are rapidly upon us. This year a a mega-Pride is also planned, the Equality March, as gay anti-Trump activists around the country are planning a "million gay" anti-Trump march on Washington, D.C., to occur on June 11 when D.C. holds its own local Pride Festival. Such a gay march on Washington has not occurred since 2000, when there was a "Millennium March," and before that in 1993, when at least 300,000 gays did so march, addressed by David Mixner and other gay friends and appointees of President Bill Clinton and his administration. Those of us who were there will remember that streets in the then D.C. gayborhood, Dupont Circle, and the areas in downtown D.C. between Dupont and the National Mall, were impassable to vehicular traffic, including public bus service, as out of town Pride celebrants took over the streets on a sparkling, sunny day with temperatures in the mid-70s.
Gay Pride festivals and marches are usually fairly free speech, or more accurately, free expression, zones. Near nudity is common - or in San Francisco, actual nudity. In somewhat more "conservative" D.C., I was watching the parade one year with an A-list, "power lesbian" acquaintance, a trade lobbyist who sits on the board of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund. (Donna Brazille was standing beside me a few months later at my friend's going away party, before she moved to California). My bright, somewhat free market-oriented, lesbian friend, and her two bright and beautiful kids, actual offspring of a donor at the famous Nobel Laureate sperm bank, watched the parade together. A woman marching in the parade beside a float was dressed as a purple caterpillar, complete with the deely bopper insect antennae novelty item popular a few years ago. I kept watching this caterpillar woman without thinking about it, finally realizing that I was trying to ascertain not just what a caterpillar had to do with the Pride march, but how her costume was constructed. Once I focused on her I realized it was not exactly the costume I had imagined. She was wearing purple deely boppers, purple body paint, a purple thong, and purple flip flops. What I had taken to be a caterpillar costume were rolls of fat and sagging breasts, naked, except for the purple body paint. I hoped the children did not notice, and luckily, I think they did not. Her painted flab was its own camoflauge.
In D.C. the gay Pride parade is one weekend day and the gay Pride festival - with music, speakers, food vendors, and outdoor booths and exhibits, is the next. The groups represented by booths include Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and gays from pretty much every religious group, and anti-religious group, you can imagine. I'm not sure that a viewpoint has ever been "rejected" at D.C. Pride (where a booth sets any group back $400 and up), though gay 2nd Amendment advocates and gay libertarians were banned in 2015 from the Olympia, Washington festival.
That is, until this year. Capitol Pride, the group that runs the D.C. Pride festival has banned a volunteer. Because of something he wrote at the conservative website RedState, Bryan Pruitt was asked to resign as a volunteer, Pruitt's offensive thoughts? He suggested in his prescient May 2016 article that Hillary and the Democrats would lose the election because the Democratic Party and the Obama Justice Department were intent on a range of allegedly "pro-LGBT" policies from bankrupting businesses that did not want to participate in gay weddings to forcing schools and other institutions to outlaw single sex facilities by giving students the right to use any locker room, shower, or bathroom they feel is appropriate to their wished-for gender. Some transsexual "queer people of color" demanded that Pruitt be banned from Pride, or at least from doing any volunteer work on it.
Rush Limbaugh was the first person (outside of the libertarian or conservative gay communities, anyway) to observe that so much of the "gay agenda" has been achieved, with gay marriage legal and gays serving in the military (the D.C. Pride festival features several booths run by gay CIA and FBI agents), that the gay political class and its lucrative fundraising engine has little reason to exist anymore. For the past year they could function as a component of the Hillary for President campaign. But for the long haul they need to find a new cause around which they can legislate, litigate, and above all, raise funds. For now, transsexuals are the answer.
No one wants transsexuals (or anyone else) to be bullied or to have their rights abrogated. But neither they, nor we gays, nor anyone else, has the right to be approved of and celebrated by everyone we meet. And transsexuals and gays don't actually have that much in common - beyond being "sexual minorities." Gay men (and maybe even lesbians) have always rather...enjoyed...single sex showers and locker rooms. And some lesbians worry that a government funded therapeutic state is now snatching up young sporty girls who were probably going to grow up to be lesbians and instead indoctrinating them with the idea that they are males trapped in female bodies, needing hormonal and surgical interventions the therapeutic state will be happy to provide - and in the process creating more tax funded jobs for Democrats with approved views about gender. Because the alternative would be school choice, where parents of a bullied child could send their little girl to an all girl's school, perhaps for athletic girls, or their little boy to an artsy school for future theater majors, where they would not come home with black eyes and suicidal thoughts, and magically no one would have to be lectured about correct thinking about sexuality. But this solution would reduce union dues to the National Education Association and thus NEA donations to Democrats.
The left has to hope it can achieve total hegemony before its nonsensical civil rights paradigm collapses. Lesbians, transgenders, and gays have only a limited amount in common, and often have competing interests, especially in winner-take-all statist systems, whether it is a gay law school professor suing to end women-only showings of Wonder Woman, or transgender "women" demanding access to the Michigan Women's Music Festival and other women-only events. It’s almost as nutty as the idea of “people of color,” where Asian-Americans, the wealthiest demographic groups (Indians having displaced Jews and Episcopalians some years ago), African-Americans, and Hispanic immigrants are lumped together as an “interest group.”
The current civil rights paradigm is papier mache virtue signaling, leaving African Americans in poverty and de facto segregated schools, while threatening to end any innovation from charter schools for inner city blacks and retirement communities for gays. But it does create jobs for - often white - middle and upper middle class lobbyists and bureaucrats. So the premise of the civil rights paradigm - that most Americans are guilty of racism etc. and so deserve to give up their freedom of association, their individual rights, and and their wealth, to an ever-expanding State in penance - must be defended by "liberals" at all cost.
The earlier Millennium March ended up the target of an FBI probe, as $750,000 collected in fees from participants disappeared. On occasion a journalist covering events for the gay press will note how often gay and AIDS events and organization end up in the red or with staffers being tried for embezzlement. It seems that the halo effect shields con artists from being perceived as such when they claim to be doing good works. So one must wonder about the "above board" members of the gay political class as well: Are they in it for the money, and is Rush correct that transsexuals are just the new produce they are selling?
And are the transsexuals and queer people of color actually offended by Mr. Pruitt's election predictions? Or are they just trying to silence other people's opinions? This year they have a list of "intersectional" demands, that "queer people of color" be given control of all gay pride events (whether they worked on them or raised funds for them or not), and that police (including the D.C. Gay and Lesbian police unit) and corporate funders like Wells Fargo bank be excluded.
There are already a growing number of separate gay pride events - black pride, latino pride, trans pride, youth pride - around the country. The people who want to take over D.C.'s annual gay pride parade and fuse it with an anti-Trump march don't want their own event. One fears they want to take over an event they didn't organize or fund, ban people who disagree with any part of their agenda, and hector (or re-educate) those who still attend.
One could easily think this is just the latest example of the Democratic Party serpent eating its own tail, as when the establishment "progressives who get things done" Clintonworld Democratic establishment alienated the left of their party by rigging the primaries against socialist Bernie Sanders.
But the queer Trotskyists of color actually have their fingers on a real issue. The gay political class, from Hillary Rosen on down, does consist of members and flunkies of the Democratic Party establishment, and they do "rig" the gay community and its political activities. For years I've videoed the D.C. Pride March and published it on YouTube. The parade line up is always the same: first is whomever is Mayor, perpetual Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton tottering on arthritic hips that should have been term limited into a recliner, and members of the City Council; second are corporate sponsors and bar floats with semi-naked boys, dancing, wearing only body oil, sunglasses, glitter, and speedos; shunted to the rear are Asian transvestites and transsexuals and black gay Baptists.
In the past I've asked about this and I was told by Capitol Pride organizers and volunteers that it had to be that way. If Congresswoman Norton etc. are not allowed to be first, they won't show up.
The gay establishment has struck back against its critics. Rick Rosendall, a leader of a small, but politically connected, group in D.C., the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance (full disclosure: Mr. Rosendall and I are frenemies; in the 80s I was a member of GLAA; and some years ago I received a bad rating from them when I ran for office as a Libertarian, even though I was the only gay candidate in my race, because of my "ideological distrust of government"), who is also a columnist for the gay Democratic Party establishment paper, the Washington Blade, writes: "...(T)he attack on D.C.’s Capital Pride by radicals whose insults are about as well-aimed as a drive-by shooting. Demands that Pride expel police and corporate sponsors, while extreme, are not the biggest problem the controversy reveals. In the name of queers, trans folk, and people of color, radicals employ an abusive tone that demands rather than engages. Even those who have long worked productively across lines of race, religion, and gender identity are treated as collaborators with the enemy if we object to unrepresentative zealots packing a meeting to take over a community-based organization."
The gay establishment has struck back against its critics. Rick Rosendall, a leader of a small, but politically connected, group in D.C., the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance (full disclosure: Mr. Rosendall and I are frenemies; in the 80s I was a member of GLAA; and some years ago I received a bad rating from them when I ran for office as a Libertarian, even though I was the only gay candidate in my race, because of my "ideological distrust of government"), who is also a columnist for the gay Democratic Party establishment paper, the Washington Blade, writes: "...(T)he attack on D.C.’s Capital Pride by radicals whose insults are about as well-aimed as a drive-by shooting. Demands that Pride expel police and corporate sponsors, while extreme, are not the biggest problem the controversy reveals. In the name of queers, trans folk, and people of color, radicals employ an abusive tone that demands rather than engages. Even those who have long worked productively across lines of race, religion, and gender identity are treated as collaborators with the enemy if we object to unrepresentative zealots packing a meeting to take over a community-based organization."
Why have these "queer people of color" never spoken up before and advocated that the politically connected and powerful and those not so connected and empowered be randomly distributed in the Pride march? Is it because the cultural degeneration of the left into fascism, censorship, and victimology has simply reached their zenith? Or has the rise of new media (on the left) allowed actual leftists to realize how they've been played and duped by the Democratic Party establishment?
Maybe both.
Will the national anti-Trump Pride march fizzle as the intersectionality activists turn off the drunk naked boys and girls too poor to go to the beach in Provincetown or Rehoboth this coming weekend, who are the bulk of the sun worshippers who attend Capitol Pride? If they do manage to ban police from the event will we see Antifa style violence of the kind that was featured at earlier anti-Trump rallies in D.C.?
Stay tuned.
Maybe both.
Will the national anti-Trump Pride march fizzle as the intersectionality activists turn off the drunk naked boys and girls too poor to go to the beach in Provincetown or Rehoboth this coming weekend, who are the bulk of the sun worshippers who attend Capitol Pride? If they do manage to ban police from the event will we see Antifa style violence of the kind that was featured at earlier anti-Trump rallies in D.C.?
Stay tuned.
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Self-described "queer people of color" look hypocritical and like their goal is simply to silence political opinions.
For years - I've videotaped it in the past (
In the past I've asked about this and I was told by Pride organizers and volunteers that it had to be that way. If Eleanor Holmes Norton etc. are not allowed to be first, they won't show up.
Why have these "queer people of color" never spoken up before and advocated that the politically connected and powerful and those not so connected and empowered be randomly distributed in the Pride march?
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