Well, Pride Week is upon us again, humping our legs. Which means, for starters, we’ll get to hear all about how tolerant certain people are, it’s just they just don’t want to see anything gay in front of them. “Why can’t they just be gay and be done with it?”—that kind of shit, the lighter side of “God hates fags.”
To be honest, I started out thinking that way myself as a nubile teen; since the beginning I supported the rebellion aspect of Pride Week. It was the circus, the lack of subtlety, that I questioned—being a quiet child who usually got what I wanted by hiding in the shadows. It’s probably a question a straight(ish) fellow like me will never fully wrap his lips around.
But here it is: if I fully endorse the queer street fiesta, I get the feeling I just might be acting like a bit of a hypocrite. After all, every time the Jesus parade passes by my house with shitty, shitty, shitty Christian rock—all full of beaming and moonfaced Christsuckers—I fucking get seriously agitated and annoyed. To say the least. It seems like church and state coming together, police guards and everything. My temptation is always to dress up naked in red paint and horns and masturbate off the roof. Luckily, I have North Country Fair for those urges. And the sense to not get arrested for giving children nightmares otherwise used against them from their official literature.
But the point is, if I hate one kind of “Look at us, we’re all into this ideology” parade, shouldn’t I diss them all? Even if the music’s better and the party’s more fun?
Well, actually, taste does have to count for something. Consider the pro-ethnic parades. As in: Jamaican steel drums, awesome; white fratboys drinking green beer, not so much.
What also has to count for something is the fact that if a buddy’s getting actively “recruited” into the Army of the Pink Triangle, it’s a little easier to consider that a compliment than, say, looking like a good sheep to indoctrinate with magic legends. Guys and girls who still worry about being hit on by gender-matches should be so lucky. Especially now that, as far as I can tell, all anyone straight does is assfuck anyway—if we’re to take any cultural pointers from Sasha Grey. As seen on Oprah. And the cover of this month’s Vice.
Okay, so, wrapping up: maybe it’s fine to like one kind of parade and not another. And as my dear old dad likes to say, “No one’s putting a gun to your head.” So if you don’t like Joggers for Jesus or March of the Lesbians, it’s certainly easy enough to stay home, folks. Still, one of the beautiful things about our advanced and degenerating civilization is that there’s plenty of weekends for both gay and Christian belief systems to shake maracas. Or rosaries and anal beads, as it were.
In the spirit of this, I’m going to ride on one of the Pridiest floats Saturday, just to add a little Russian garlic sausage to the proceedings. And maybe, just maybe, next year I’ll walk in the Jesus parade out of a larger sense of fairness. If I’m not burning in Hell with all my Babylonian friends by then, that is.
