WHY NOBODY NEEDS A “STRAIGHT PRIDE PARADE”

So. Let’s talk about why nobody needs “Straight Pride.”

The most obvious reason is that it’s inane, and so too is anyone pondering participation. I guess that’s not the most diplomatic way to put it, but if I wanted to touch someone else’s heart today I’d just get one out of the freezer.

But just being a jackass isn’t the whole story. Plenty of people are naturally asinine, but few conceive ideas as worthless as this.

That requires something extra: pointed ignorance of recent history. Which, unlike the personalities at fault, is actually something we can potentially fix in a few hundred words.

Assuming of course we put aside the theological implications of a miracle.

Confirmed: Satan does indeed love rainbows.

Context: The New York Times and Boston Globe reported this week that a couple of Beantown blockheads have proposed a so-called “Straight Pride Parade” in Boston, which would be the worst thing to happen to that city since 1770 or so.

The Globe writes:

“The Straight Pride Parade would tentatively take place August 31 and follow the same route of the city’s LGBTQ Pride Parade. The event celebrating heterosexuality would include floats and other props, and be a ‘chance to have a patriotic parade in Boston as we celebrate straight pride,’ one of the organizers said.”

Personally, I think the acceptable mode of “celebrating heterosexuality” is just to have straight sex with consenting partners in spaces where everyone present is comfortable. The way Satan intended.

Think Progress notes that the organizers–one of whom is apparently gay, so anybody’s guess what the fuck is really going on here–are mostly just a bunch of far-right weirdos who squat on social media saying things like, “We may get to throw Communists out of helicopters soon.”

Bastions of normalcy, in other words. To completely muddy the cluster-everything even further, the weirdos secured has-been, never-was media non-personality Milo Yiannopoulos to promote the sham.

Yiannopoulos, in case you just teleported in from a better timeline and are frantically collecting enough wonderflonium to get back to your own reality, is also gay. And he’s the third-string Nazi you book if Richard Spencer won’t call you back and the Proud Boys guy already keyed your car.

So yeah, I am starting to suspect that “Straight Pride” might be, well, a touch insincere, except for the part about being sincerely obnoxious.

Rather than being about straight pride, “Straight Pride” appears to be just harassment. Or a Katamari of stupid.

I’m bringing this up–and am sensitive about this in the first place–because people often accuse Satanists of just being trolls or “provocateurs” (which is French for “unemployable”). But I think this contrast with some actual trolls makes the difference distinctly–almost violently–apparent.

Even if these people were not obvious cons, the whole idea of a “Straight Pride Parade” misreads LGBTQ Pride to begin with. Pride is not something that queer+ people just do for the hell of it; it’s a tool that solves a tangible social problem.

In 1965, four years before the first Pride march, gay rights groups began yearly picketing of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, actions dubbed “Annual Reminder.”

Those protests specifically highlighted hiring discrimination against openly gay Americans in the ’60s. “They were fighting for jobs,” Bob Skiba, curator the William Way LGBT Community Center, told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Pride in Istanbul. That’s Istanbul, not Constantinople.

They carried signs demanding “equality before the law” and “rights to make their maximum contribution to society” because, demonstrably, American institutions denied them this.

The 1969 Stonewall Riots came in response to police raids on gay and trans bars. Britannica notes that “the solicitation of homosexual relations was an illegal act in New York City (and indeed virtually all other urban centres). Gay bars were places of refuge; many of those bars were, however, subject to regular police harassment.”

Lillian Faderman’s book The Gay Revolution describes the aftermath of such an attack:

“[A minister] had been called to help two homosexual men whose genitals had been kicked in. They were writhing in pain. He telephoned the Presbyterian Hospital for an ambulance, but the dispatcher refused to send one. He wanted to call the police, but the injured men stopped him. ‘It was the police who did it,’ they said.”

Faderman also writes that when activists lobbied to repeal sodomy laws politicians told them they couldn’t dare because “the voters would say we were in favor of sin.”

Writer JM Ellison (in a blog pointing out that the early gay rights movement was itself segregated around gender) notes that “the people who marched were risking their jobs, families and safety”–not only by marching but just by being non-straight to begin with.

And that of course is why they marched. Pride was the byword because it’s an antidote to shame. America wanted to punish gay, lesbian, bi, trans, queer, and otherwise non-conforming people for the shame of not being straight.

And they, in response, said no. And every year they still do.

Straight people don’t need a Pride Parade for the same reason that people who can walk uninhibited don’t need wheelchairs, and people with personalities don’t need AXE body spray.

Nowhere in America is anyone ever fired for being straight. Nowhere is it illegal to have straight sex. No politician turns down the heterosexual lobby as too sinful.

Straight people may be harassed on the job, subject to police violence, or shorted by City Hall. But never because they’re straight. Police never raid straight bars–in fact we don’t even call them straight bars. Nobody’s “jobs, families, and safety” are at risk over their straight identity.

And cops have never kicked in the genitals of “Straight Pride Parade” organizers.

Although I guess it’s never too late…

Ever notice rainbows aren’t straight either?