august 5, 2003 at pasalymany

Shame on Pride

by Meg Hewings
Though Montreal's Divers/Cité is better than most other big cities' gay pride events at including racially diverse programming, free events and grassroots community endeavours, it's the celebration's increasing consumerism that troubles many queers with anti-oppression, liberationist political impulses.

Given that Pride is happening in the same downtown street blocks as the WTO protests and riot-cop swarms this summer, the lack of a radical political edge to Pride has become more glaring, as has its market-driven excesses.

Increasingly, more notably in big U.S. cities, Pride parades have morphed from grassroots street protests and riots into multi-million-dollar pro-capitalist extravaganzas that have little, if any political through-lines. Pride events did not start as places to cheer wildly for a diesel-fuelled float full of tight-assed well-built men and typically hetero-sexy-looking women, to drink Molson beer under a tent, or to worry endlessly about how you look. Pride marches were radical street movements, about chanting, taking up space and fighting oppression.

"The political edge of Pride has changed. Events seem to be more and more about celebrating how far we've come as gays," says Gilles Marchildon, the executive director of EGALE. But there's an awful lot compromised in this effort to "make it," especially when gay celebrations start to serve as a conduit for a week-long celebration that pushes every corporate contingent under the sun - including companies (and products) that have poor human-rights track records, set impossibly high body ideals, and make limitless consumerism and purchasing rights the visible mantra of gay community power.

It is not surprising that many queers (especially those that are disenfranchised in other aspects of society) feel increasingly alienated or disinterested by Pride - maybe they're over demonstrating against the WTO. Gays may have gained more human rights, but many of the linking oppressions facing queers and non-queers alike - poverty, racism, sexism - that existed in the past, still exist today. There's nothing wrong with a damned good party, for the spirit and body. What's a shame is how Pride is more often than not about forgetting, rather than celebrating, the lessons and growing pains of a collective queer history of struggle.