By Elizabeth Cooper
Pride invaded NYC this past weekend, and like many queer women, I partook in some of the festivities. Note my choice of language. Festivities. I just read a Gawker article “A Straight Person’s Guide to Gay Pride” where they describe Pride as “a giant celebration of living somewhere over the rainbow.” Yet the organizers of the Dyke March, an event in Pride weekend, describe it as “a protest march, not a parade.” So, what is Pride? A party or a protest? What does it represent to the LGBT community, LGBT individuals, me and you?
My personal point for comparison to this past weekend was the National March for Equality back in October, which EW editor Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux called “transformative” and “an incredible high” because we were “fighting for what was right.” I felt similarly high from the day. I had spent many hours organizing to get our busload of Princeton students to come march for equal rights, and the fruits of my labor tasted sweet indeed.
The Dyke March, on the other hand, did not feel transformative, at least for me. Although I wanted it to be a protest, it didn’t feel like such for a few reasons. Most importantly, I hadn’t been invested in the organization of the march, and therefore hadn’t really thought about what the march meant to me – it was happening, and I felt like since I was in the city partially for Pride and consider myself an activist in some respects, I should go. Amongst the people I marched with, I felt we shared this sense of not exactly knowing why we were marching. A couple of people thought we were going to be watching a parade, rather than participating in a protest. Once they realized the nature of the march, namely that it was a protest rather than a parade, they asked what we were protesting. I ventured a vague answer about protesting homophobia, but even the question made me insecure about not being more informed about what the march was about, as a whole, and for me personally.
As I was thinking about what I was marching for the day before, I had identified what meant and means the most to me personally right now – acceptance of LGBT children by their parents and family. I thought writing a slogan encapsulating that on a shirt would be cool both during the march and as a keepsake. I am happy and proud that I took the time to invest in my idea. However, at the march, it didn’t prove as valuable for making me feel engaged. People didn’t seem to read it like they would read and interact with a sign.
Also, it turns out not having the physical task of carrying a sign made me feel less physically engaged with the march. I wrote a paper about this connection between physical experiences and knowledge last fall for my Performance Studies class (highly recommended). I concluded that a reason for the psychological success of the march for myself and many others was that we were engaging physically for something we believed in, encompassing the way of knowing from the body in addition to from the mind. Chanting, and carrying heavy signs, all parts of my Princeton marching experience, were absent from my Dyke March.
In direct opposition to my reasoning that I would have enjoyed the Dyke March more if I had felt more engaged physically and politically, the Gawker article describes the main Pride event, the Gay Pride Parade on Sunday, as “no longer very political. It’s mostly about corporations telling us that they’re ‘down with the gays’ and an excuse for gay people party.” After which they write, “Don’t judge us.” Why judge? I might if I got up on my high horse, but really, I think I would have enjoyed the Dyke March more if I had fully embraced whatever I wanted to get out of it, whether that be political engagement or just a grand old time with old and new friends. The Dyke March website also acknowledges its celebratory aspects by describing itself as “in celebration of LBTQ women” in addition to its purpose as a “protest against ongoing discrimination, harassment, and anti-LBTQ violence in schools, on the job, in our families, and on the streets.”
Whether you love politics, partying, or both, Pride can be incredibly fun, engaging, and important. (Especially for the urban gays, because I would like to acknowledge that the major cities’ gay pride parades do cater to and represent an urban crowd.) And regardless of all this internal mumbo jumbo, whether you were clear on your intention for being at pride, or not, like me, being there does count for something for the LGBT community. Visibility. As they used to and still do chant on the streets, we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.
Image courtesy of Elizabeth Cooper.
Thanks for this, Elizabeth. I think it’s absolutely worth underscoring that visibility is in itself a form of queer protest, and that actively and aggressively pushing queerness into the lives of straight people is more or less as radical as it comes. It is also, I believe, the single most valuable form of activism, and the moderate version (“Everyone knows someone who’s gay!”) and the more radical version (using the appearance of queerness to unsettle and challenge people, e.g. a public kiss-in or indeed a Dyke March) can work together very productively. It is not irrelevant that one of the slogans at Stonewall was “gay is good!”–that attitude of simple affirmation persists in the activities which commemorate Stonewall’s anniversary.
That said, I see in your ambivalence about the Dyke March-as-protest a certain divorce of this event from the history of gay activism. It seems as if something like a Dyke March sits rather uneasily in the context of the more mainstream civil rights movement that is LGBT activism today. You asked what the march was protesting, and I think that was a good question–because an easy example of the problems inherent in answering that question would be that by its name, to me a “Dyke March” would be protesting the patriarchal institution of marriage in favor of the beauty of wymynhood, or something from the ’80s like that, while moderate LGBT activism today supports marriage wholeheartedly as an institution same-sex couples should be able to buy into. I like very much the issue that you decided to push on your t-shirt because it straddles this moderate-radical divide… but a Dyke March still seems, sadly, like an anachronism to me, in contrast to the much more sign-of-the-times National Equality March. It makes sense that NEM would have been more energizing for that reason: its messaging contained much more to relate to for people of our generation.
Emily posted a great response to my post, filling in the cultural/political/historical context that I was lacking: http://worthlessdrivel.net/2010/07/01/new-york-city-dyke-march-a-curious-anachronism/
Check it out!
oh whoops. I hadn’t seen her comment yet, so my comment is slightly redundant. but still, check out her post!
I love that picture. Great post.