pride. shame. summer

Summer has arrived. Well, it’s been here a while, but it’s been suffering from a fit of pique. gloomy and doomy and raspy with sorrow, apparently. Here on the west coast, summer has been grumpy. But something happened, and she finally got out of bed, got dressed and came out to play. But still, she dressed for winter.

Last weekend, it was “Pride” weekend. on Saturday there was a dyke march, and that was fun. There were actual lesbians there, including women I know from my radical circles and from sobriety stuff and from storytelling and from comedy. My worlds came together. Women I love. I love women. We talked politics and ate hot dogs and watched the entertainment.

Which was:

An earnest young woman in jeans and tee-shirt, singing love songs with a voice like Amy Ray’s. She was cute.

Kate Reid! I got there too late to hear much of her this time, but I caught the last few bars of “Emergency Dyke Project”. That was fun.

scowling, black-clad young women dressed to look like men, dancing to rap music. “Honey, you don’t need to paste a beard on your face–wait ’till you’re in your thirties, it will come all on its own,” I want to say. That was like watching a train wreck.

The next day, I went to the gym. In the change room, there was just me and L. She’s a little older than me, and has been working out with BIG weights for at least as long as I have, but probably more consistently.

She said, “you’re not going to the parade?”

“No. It kinda makes me tired,” i said.

“Yea,” she replied, “y’know, I liked it better when we were ashamed.”

hahahahahahahhhahahah.

yup. now that we’re all proud and shit, we are: a) just like everyone else; b) except when we are all about sexsexsex (and kink), and mostly; c) affluent gay men.

even the lesbians. who aren’t lesbians these days so much as “queer” which is much less threatening.

“we’re not out to change anything any more, you know?” said L.

The spectacle of the parade is kind of fun. The beautiful bodies, the dancing and music, the high-fives and laughter.  But it’s also a bit sinister, you know? I can’t help but think of pre-WW 2 Germany–when there was all kinds of this kind of highly sexualized, gay-friendly stuff going on–overdrive hedonism even as the economy was going to shit and a loaf of bread cost a wheelbarrow full of German Marks. It seems desperate. The party frocks, the sparkly rainbows, the “WE ARE OUT AND PROUD” business. the corporate sponsorship.

Now, I can have a good time, and i’m all about celebrating our successes and our solidarity. But KFC and the cops are not my friends. Gay men are often punished for being gay, but that’s because they are perceived to be like women. They are still men, and they still have patriarchal power of men over women. Unless they have an analysis of how sexism operates in their lives and how their oppression is based in sexism, they’re not likely to be political allies.

Anyhow. L was right, back then, before pride parades, we had a bit more unity, it seemed. we could see better, from the outside, how the structures of society were built to exclude anyone other. but the stuff inside the structures is shiny. and comfortable. and if you can get in there, it feels good to belong. and power, too, is heady stuff. it’s inside the structures of domination, not outside. so when we were outside, we could see how it corrupted, how it eroded relationships and de-railed movements. When we’re inside, on the parade float with the thumpy dance music in our ears, maybe we think we are moving.

nah. i’d rather do squats for now. and spend the evening planning a syllabus for my next teaching gig: “Social Issues in Education”. 12 weeks i have to cover ’em all. Last one, the focus was class. This time, i think it’ll be sex and feminism. and you know what? in the recommended readings package for this course (I have to use at last 9 of about 14 or so), only ONE talked about “gender equity in education”. The other four even remotely concerned with feminism and sexism talked about queer issues, or masculinity or homophobia.

I’m on the lookout for good articles about feminist pedagogy and feminism in education. I’ll let you know what i find, and if you have any links to fire over here, i will be grateful and so will my students.