Here we are on Sunday, our Biblically-mandated day of rest, as the 47th annual Portland Pride celebration winds through downtown’s tent-cluttered streets and offers a rich spectacle of—let’s be blunt—the myriad brands of human sexuality.
Not just public declarations of who does what with who…but flags! Tons of ‘em. Every sexual preference waves a banner (there are 20 different ones, by latest count) gaily, even from government offices where—let’s be blunt—telling any halfway-dirty joke to a fellow bureaucrat will get you fired. Or where a silly “bi” joke will rock a great American newspaper in a Twitter-storm.
Frankly, these flags seem intimidating to those of us who use our genitalia in the unfashionable way, between a “person who ovulates” and someone else who “produces wiggly-things.”
When those two creatures meet and meld the human race continues, for better or worse. This is the only thing that nature really seems to care much about. The rest of the sex-stuff falls into the category of entertainment.
So where are the hetero-flags for us mopes?
Here’s a challenge forour hardy band of Dissenters: however you apply the age-old command of “place tab A into Slot B,” you are invited—nay! challenged!— to design a straight flag. Suggested categories:
The “That tickles!” flag.
The “Missionaries Didn’t Do That!” flag.
The “What Did You Say Your Name Is?” morning-after flag.
The “I Sorta Love You” flag.
The “Why Can’t We Find a Baby-Sitter for Date-Nite?” flag.
The “Community Property” flag.
The “Afternoon Quicky” flag.
The “Marriage Is Another Word for Celibacy” flag.
….the winner will get a dog-eared copy of “The Joy of Sex.”
Back to the parade, which the Oregonian predicted…
Portland Pride: It’s back, and it’s bigger and better than ever
…which marched to Tom McCall Waterfront Park, where $8 gains admission to the afternoon’s sexual-political speeches…but wait..!
ALL attendees, age 5 years and older, are required to show proof of vaccination at the festival gate entrance as they enter the festival grounds.
Sequined N95s will be much in evidence.
Despite the fact that the parade has now being going on for four decades (minus one Covid year); and despite the fact that many political office-holders make it a point to advertise their sexual habits (our current governor and one who is likely to be the next governor, among others); and despite the all-in involvement of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry with…
… Drag Queen Storytime with Poison Waters in the Planetarium, Laser Light Shows by Lady Gaga, Queen, and Elton John, Science Demos, And much more!!
…and the entrance to the festival on SW Harvey Milk Way (a street renamed by Portland’s government to memorialize a San Francisco gay martyr); despite the city of Portland’s web site plugging the festival; despite the festival being run by the non-profit Pride Northwest, whose executive director, Deborah Porta (she/they) was—just a coincidence—one of 20 members of the Portland Charter Commission, which is offering a radical rewrite of the city’s charter that will make it easier for various racial/sexual groups to elect someone who, in the commission’s words, “looks like” people in the “community…” the parade marched not just under Portland’s murky skies but also, a reminder that, in Pride’s words…
The ever-increasing use of violence against our citizens, of whom many are part of the LGBTQ+ community, is both frightening and unacceptable.
…not that Pride Northwest’s statement of fact was backed-up by—y’know—facts.
If one bothered to check the most recent (2020)US Department of Justice stats, there were 34 “sexual gender” hate crimes in Oregon that year. Gender? Total: 2. Our “social justice” DA’s web site recorded 22 “sexual orientation” hate crimes from 2019 through 2022; gender racked up 17. Nice if it was zero—but, really?
If there was “ever increasing violence” against the community, you might image that Pride Northwest would be in favor of increased law enforcement.
Nah: here’s the Pride Northwest policy…
Beginning in 2021, uniformed and armed law enforcement officers will be disallowed from marching in the Portland Pride Parade and from exhibiting at the Portland Pride Waterfront Festival.
…and they happily signed of the Stop Cop Riot letter during the summer riots, which presented a laundry-list of beefs against police, such as…
The end to the false narrative that protestors are violent and are precipitating the violent response of the police.
…and…
Compliance with and mandatory training on verbal de-escalation tactics, proven to be the only approach that works for crowd management.
…and a particularly snide demand for…
Required mental health services for officers staffing crowd control to ensure that they are not operating out of years of PTSD…
By the way, how’s that defunding the police going these days?
Pride Northwest would have the straight mopes believe that there is just one big, happy, clump of “gays,” when anyone who knows anyone “gay” knows there are in-group/out-group conflicts among the clump of sexual practices under the tent.
Lesbians look down their noses at male gays, who have issues with flamers as opposed to the Lincoln Club-types; drag queens are seen by many as exhibitionists outside the sexual corral; and then there’s the creepy stuff with kids and “gender affirmation,” and gays who find the whole “fluid gender” stuff a hard sell and that getting children mixed up with the intellectual contortions of “gender affirmation” is making women’s sports a spectacle and is producing a backlash that might just put a guy like Florida’s Ron DeSantis in the White House.
And then there are matters racial—and thus Pride Northwest had to deal with its overlap with Juneteenth by taking an awkward rhetorical knee…
Historically, Pride celebrations across the nation have struggled to center, and have often intentionally excluded the voices and experiences of LGBTQIA2S+ Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Pride Northwest has long believed that Pride events and their organizers can and must do better.
But the Pride Festival and Juneteenth and the other events (too numerous to mention) beg the question: when will this goal, whatever you want to call it or how you want to define it, be realized? When will the media bow-and-scrapes end? When will a candidate cease to broadcast “their” sexual practices in the scrounge for votes? When will corporations—the most heartless of human creations—stop selling detergent and sugary processed junk under the rainbow flag…or maybe the pastel trans flag…or the non-binary pride flag…or…?
Is the horizon ever-receding?
There are jobs, status-signals, petty offices, ad-dollars, non-profit profits, and flag-makers who are banking on the promised land never being reached.
And so here are:
There’s no “us” in U.S.
I've been out for nearly 50 years. Out, but cautious. Out but alienated. Out but who really cares that much anymore?
The fragmentation bombs of identity mean we act out our oppression cards to our fellow "victims". We sometimes embody the drama and anger in our daily lives except for most of the time when we don't. We're too busy doing other things. Still, once a year we gay-marry our victimhood to our pride and let their offspring cavort in vivid hues of remembered oppression. The next day, not nearly so much.
Remembered victimhood is a dubious pleasure but we play it zealously if only because we're aging so fast we can't recall their narrative threads any longer. We're growing old in a rapidly fragmenting world. But on this one holy day, let's remember our years of martrydom and deliverance. There's simply not that much else to valorize except, perhaps, a liberated world imploding around our gaily-painted faces. Who knows? We might miss it someday.
I was thinking today, while my beloved of almost 40 years was downtown participating with the like it or not, community standard. I drove her there and spent a blissful day in my greenhouse and garden and a couple nice happy fathers day wishes from my boys. A perfect day.