Where PRIDE Lost its Pride
I can’t help but feel that Western Pride has really lost its purpose.
June 1st / ADELAIDE, 2021
I get a text from a friend: “Happy Pride Month”.
I chuckle, “Lol happy pride month to you too.” We waste ten minutes chatting about how inane it feels, and fire back and forth memes about capitalist Pink-Washing. It was some light entertainment. But pride? I haven’t felt that in a long time.
June 28th / NEW YORK, 1969
It’s 1:20 AM in New York City, and eight undercover police officers enter a bar. They intend to raid it for illegal activity. For many of its patrons however, this bar is a refuge. The police line up around 200 of them for an ID check. Any patrons in women’s clothing are examined by female officers and arrested if discovered to have male genitalia. The police expect those who are flushed from the building to flee. However, fed up with this relentless mistreatment, they join a growing crowd of onlookers who watch from the street as more police officers arrive.
Among others led into a police van, a woman in masculine attire complains of tight handcuffs and is roughed up by police. By now the crowd has reached a size of around five hundred, and they are no longer silent. Raids like these are all too common. Threats turn to violence, as beer cans, coins, and bricks are thrown at police, and the crowd transforms into a riot. The police are momentarily overwhelmed and barricade themselves inside the bar until reinforcements arrive. Tires on police vehicles are slashed. The streets are not cleared until after 4:00 AM. Thirteen people are arrested. Four police and some members of the crowd are injured. But it doesn’t end there. The following night, the rioting continues, despite the enlarged police presence. The crowd is also larger. Past riots protesting gay rights have proved unsuccessful due to lack of support, but finally, thousands of people join them. The riots last for six days.
That bar was called Stonewall Inn, and the Stonewall riots are now commonly recognised as one of the key events that ignited the gay rights movement in the US, and abroad.
To give global context, this screenshot of an interactive map of the legality of same-sex relations through time shows the state of world laws 52 years ago in 1969.
May 10th / ADELAIDE, 1972
Dr. George Duncan is a lecturer at the Adelaide University Law School. At around 11:00 pm he goes to meet two other men on the bank of the city’s Torrens River, a common meeting place for gay people in 1972. Duncan and his company are suddenly confronted by a group of men and Duncan is thrown into the river. Badly injured and unable to swim, Duncan drowns.
In 1985, those men are revealed to have been senior Vice Squad members of the South Australian Police. Two of the policemen were charged with manslaughter and went to trial in 1988 but were acquitted because they refused to testify.
The murder of Dr. George Duncan sparked public outrage that ultimately led to South Australia being the first Australian state to decriminalise homosexuality in 1975.
Tasmania was the final state in Australia to legalise homosexuality in 1997.
Overall, sexual orientation laws around the world have come a long way since 1969. This map details the specific laws by country, as of December 2020. A clear divide exists between the western world, in blue, and the regions that constitute the Islamic sphere (Africa and the Middle East) in oranges and reds. According to this map, homosexual acts are criminal in 70 countries and punishable by death in 11. And this omits the numerous places in the world where gays are killed under installations of sharia law or other cultural practices that operate outside of the country’s legislation.
May 4th / IRAN, 2021
20-year-old Ali Fazeli Monfared has just received his military service exemption card. Exemptions from conscription are available under the identification of homosexuality as a mental illness in Iran. Fazeli Monfared plans to seek asylum in Turkey in the coming days. However, a family member discovers he has been exempted from the military on grounds of homosexuality. He is kidnapped near the city of Ahvaz, Iran, and beheaded by his half-brother and two cousins. The following day, Fazeli Monfared’s mother finds her son’s body under a tree, after being given directions to the location.
October 4th / UGANDA, 2019
28-year-old Brian Wasswa is an openly gay LGBT activist who has worked with The AIDS Support Organization (TASO) to help educate young people living with HIV about the importance of sticking to treatment. On the afternoon of the 4th, Wasswa is found by local children in his home, lying beaten in a pool of blood. Wasswa was rushed to hospital but died the following day.
Gay sex is already punishable by life imprisonment in Uganda under the British colonial penal code, established in 1990. But in response to the murder, the Ugandan government, for the second time, attempted to introduce the death penalty for homosexual acts, as well as criminalize so-called “promotion and recruitment” by gay people. This was an attempted extension of Uganda’s 2014 Anti-Homosexuality Act, which criminalized the “promotion” of homosexuality, and early drafts included the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.” In both 2014 and 2019, the attempts to elevate the punishment for homosexuality to the death penalty were ineffectual.
Statistics on the number of gay hate crimes and murders in countries where homosexuality is outlawed, simply do not exist. Whereas countries with very positive legislation have far more meticulous records of hate crimes. However, in this 2017 article, Iraqi LGBT activist, Amir Ashour, estimates there has been at least one systematic murder campaign under ISIS per year since 2006. During the most recent campaign that January, Ashour says he personally knew several who were killed, but the list of names was hundreds long.
16th June / HUNGARY, 2021
The parliament of Hungary passes a law that bans the presence of gay people in educational materials and media for those under 18 years old. The law was passed by a vote of 157 to 1. Supporters have claimed the law will help fight paedophilia. Now outlawed are representations of any sexuality other than heterosexual in educational material or entertainment material that could be perceived as targeting under 18s. Similarly banned are references to or representations of sex reassignment surgery, and it is now impossible to change the gender assigned on ones’ legal documents. Additionally, only registered providers on a selected list may now conduct sex education school programs. Furthermore, corporations are banned from running advertisements in support of gay rights, if they are deemed as targeting the under 18 age group. The law has been likened to Russia’s similar “propaganda” law passed in 2013, which has since become a mechanism for legal harassment of sexual minority groups.
Pride In The West
The term Pink-Washing originally refers to the use of the Pink Ribbon on consumer packaging to encourage consumers to purchase products in the name of breast cancer research. The name refers to the symbolic colour of breast cancer awareness, and though pink is not associated with queer awareness, the term has been borrowed and, in this context, refers to the practice of “using gay-related issues in positive ways in order to distract attention from negative actions by an organization, country or government.”
Take this comparison of Twitter account branding in June. It proves two things. Firstly, Pride Month is not viewed the same way in the Middle East as it is elsewhere in the world. Furthermore, each of these companies has actively strategized their branding in order to maximise crowd approval. While some might consider this a good business model, it’s hard to ignore the fact that this is ultimately a bid to increase profits by manipulating consumers into faux compassion, which is not only callous given the personal nature of the topic, but morally corrupt.
There’s a sport to finding the most ridiculous example of Pink-Washing in the Western world. I have to admit, I had some fun with it this year. My personal favourite is this ad featuring actress Laverne Cox.
The alternative to poking fun at these is to get angry and bitter. After all, this is a part of my identity I spent years coming to terms with, and it has been reduced to a marketing ploy, and I’m somehow supposed to be grateful for the “inclusion”? Perhaps even, being annoyed at Pink-Washing is the newest way to exhibit one’s “queer allyship”. However, I’m prepared to admit that despite my animosity, this may be a good thing. If you reframe your perspective, complaining about Pink-Washing is a sign that we’ve succeeded. We now have the privilege to be annoyed at the blatant expression of queer freedom that capitalist markets are feeding off. It’s a much better alternative to fearing for our lives. To anyone fighting in the streets of New York outside Stonewall those heated nights, you can be certain this is more than they could’ve hoped for.
Use of the LGBT acronym is now risky in the West, and not because society at large detests those of the LGBT community, those days are long gone. No, the risk now is not constantly being up to date, and saying something that might have been acceptable last year, but isn’t today. No one is fearful of queer people anymore; they’re just scared they might put the letters in the wrong order.
While the matter has become over-politicised, it wouldn’t be fair to blame the individual people of this community. Of the people I know, most of us don’t really know what’s going on, and we certainly didn’t have a hand in creating the much-publicised acronym or its associated cult-like branding. But we dare not disagree. At some point in our lives, the LGBT community has been a place of refuge. Friends who understood us when no one else would. So, how dare we be critical of it now? We all know the struggles that life as a minority can represent. It feels wrong to challenge and critique a community that has been so supportive and integral to our survival, and yet that is exactly what we must do. If we don’t, who else will?
The over-idealisation of politically correct terms has become ubiquitous throughout Western culture. Over the last hundred years, we’ve seen social movements and social technology accumulate into what we have today: heightened social compassion that stems from a history of human rights advancements. We are steered by our own innate desire to amend the suffering in others’ lives, and therefore safeguard our own, so that we feel as if we have conquered something that will never happen again. In a broad sense, these are great, compassionate values to hold. But they become a problem when we allow our problem-solving habit to over-work. We trip ourselves over the faux inclusivity of every minority into one acronym instead of focussing on the issues that are essential to their well-being. We problematise any variation that exists between people as evidence of the oppression lurking in every corner. This then becomes a minefield of competing to be more politically correct than others in order to infer that one is more compassionate, and therefore superior to someone else, despite the fact that their core values may actually align. To avoid this conflict, many endanger themselves by blindly accepting whatever is the currently agreed-upon level of inclusivity, without critical assessment to determine if those things improve the quality of life of the people in question. To do so may be an easy way to live smoothly, but truly sacrifices one’s individual integrity. It is this that creates dogmatic so-called “wokeness" in our society that many are slowly beginning to see as truly harmful.
Woke-ism uses emotional blackmail to stop us from thinking for ourselves, so that gradually we are pulled more and more into a dogmatic groupthink. It is incredibly hard now to have nuanced and constructive discussions about any LGBT issue, despite how loud the activists may seem. What looks like discussion is mostly just loud echo chambers full of people parroting identical buzz-phrases in substitute for real thought. Even dare to bring up these issues in a non-inflammatory way, and even before introducing a contention people will jump to correct your supposed lack of judgment, ready to tell you what you must do, how you have to think and what is right. Woke-ism masquerades as the next frontier of human rights but is fundamentally just interested in gaining control of societal thought and ideas.
Specifically, I’m taking a risk here by not using LGBTQIA or LGBTQI+ or one of the other commonly acceptable variants. To some, the issue will not be clear, but by using LGBT I could be viewed as excluding anyone represented by the QIA+. The longest version of the acronym I could find is LGGBTTQQ2IAAAP+ which stands for Lesbian, Gay/Genderqueer, Bisexual, Transgender/Transsexual, Queer/Questioning, Two-Spirit, Intersex, Asexual/Aromantic/Agender, Pansexual. At one point there was even an attempt to include the BDSM community, with calls to add ‘K’ for kinky. Thankfully, that never really took hold. Whatever risk I take by my choice of acronym, it is minuscule compared to the risk taken by Brian Wasswa, Ali Fazeli Monfared and many more like them. They risked their lives, while we squabble over details. Yet they face it anyway, because they want what we already have: a better future for LGBT people in their country, with more freedom, less illness and less persecution.
7th July / LONDON, 2018
A group of 8 lesbians from the Get the L Out group force their way, uninvited, into the front of the London Pride march. They are protesting the “increasingly anti-lesbian and misogynistic” LGBT movement and “the erasure of lesbians”. The movement follows worldwide accusations of transphobia toward lesbians for excluding trans women from their dating pool. This video captures some of the march. The groups’ chants include, “No man can be a lesbian”, and “LGBT doesn’t speak for me”, to which some in the crowd reply, “Trans rights are human rights”.
Later, a member of the marching group is handing out fliers to the crowd, “I’ve been called a vagina-fetishist and a transphobe, just because I don’t sleep with people with penises”, she explains. One crowd member agrees, “Sleep with someone with a dick? Why would I? I’m a lesbian”.
The actions of the group were publicly condemned afterwards in a statement by London Pride officials. In the statement, they reject the values of the Get the L Out group and reiterate their own values of “inclusion and respect and support for the most marginalised parts of our community”. The statement concludes, “this issue must be stamped out and we will do everything we can to use our platform for good”.
This is an example of heated friction occurring in the LGBT community, here between lesbians and transwomen. Furthermore, other points of dispute include the following. Bisexual women are only trying to attract male attention. Bisexual men are in denial. Those not sexually attracted to trans people are transphobes. Asexuals are lying and/or confused and/or unsuccessful. De-transitioners are hated by the trans community for transitioning back to their biological gender, with varying degrees of hormonal, developmental, or surgical harms. Neo-pronouns proliferate and are applauded, such as Fae/Faer/Faerself, Tree/Treeself, It/Itself and even online emojiself pronouns such as 💫/💫's/💫self. As these self-selected pronouns propagate social media bios, biological sex is removed from birth certificates. Objective truth is rejected. Everybody is angry. Nobody can agree. If you can’t keep up, you’re a bigot.
All this while legal genocide by execution of homosexuals still occurs in at least 10 countries. Have we no shame?
To the LGBT individuals of the Western world, isn’t it time we break up the band? The alliance between these identities was important for a long time, and it made tactical sense when fighting for basic human rights. But now? I’d like to be able to live my life without having my opinions decided for me. I’d like to be a free thinker. I don’t want others to assume my political leaning based on my membership to the “LGBT community” – which by the way, is membership by birth, not choice.
We’ve stopped being a community inclusive of differing ideas and perspectives. Personally, I see far more in-fighting between the LGBT sub-groups than I see between the LGBT and the cis-straight community. As crucial as it has been for trans rights, the trans discussion has displaced the framework of the homosexual/bisexual conversation, by socially redefining what constitutes sex and therefore what it means to be same-sex attracted. Successively, the non-binary conversation has displaced the trans conversation by rejecting the gender binary that the very concept of being transgender rests upon. The result is a lot of confusion. We are hell-bent to find a set of hard and fast definitions and labels, driven by our craving to understand ourselves, but ignoring the reality that human sexuality is complex, dynamic and its’ intricacies evolve over a lifetime. Simultaneously, we insist there be enough wiggle-room in the labels as these things are personal, and often self-identified by an individual – which is what they should be. Yet this goes against our categorising pursuit. Ultimately, this has led to fracturing in many directions amongst a community that once stood together with so much love, strength and pride.
There are, however, people who need our help. It’s sometimes hard to appreciate how much we’ve achieved in Western society, regarding LGBT rights. The job is by no means complete, especially when it comes to issues such as same-sex adoptions or employment protections, but, for the most part, the issues that we face are superficial. What is portrayed as the forefront of Pride in the West is an endless evolution of gender categorisations, anti-scientific rhetoric, and post-modern deconstructionism. We sit here in Westernised countries, arguing about trans women in sports, or gay representation in film media. Compare this to the huge chunk of the world’s LGBT population living in countries where their housing, livelihood, or actual life is under threat if they were to be themselves. I can’t help but feel that Western Pride has really lost its purpose.
Remember when we ached to live in a world where people didn’t have to “come out”? Not because we’d regress back into an age where it wasn’t accepted, but because it just wouldn’t be a big deal. The term was originally coined for debutantes, who upon reaching a certain age were presented to society. They “came out”, as it were, now declared available to be married off. It was adopted by homosexuals in the early 20th century and evolved to capture the essence of secrecy that came with announcing something so burdened with negative connotations. Often it was a big risk, it affected relationships, social standings, and employability. Now it seems there is an endless and dynamic iteration of gender/sexuality categories that allow individuals to “come out” numerous times throughout their life. Furthermore, coming out has earned such a high social currency, there is a trend of people doing it for popularity, before later retracting it. The terms “homophobe” or “transphobe” have become high-impact condemnations. And to think, only ten years ago it was almost the opposite.
Those of us fortunate enough to be in the west have come a long way. Older generations of us have been through much, but now we can finally say we are safe. Or at least as safe as straight people. Which is the best kind of equality we could hope for. Pride began with incredible camaraderie. It’s because of the bravery and sacrifices of older generations that my friends and I don’t have to fear being drowned in the Torrens River by police. We have rights, we can get married. I will never stop being thankful for that. And even though our lives aren’t perfect, our problems no longer outweigh the problems of other groups.
This isn’t the case everywhere in the world. But we can change that. The hunger for activism is being wasted here in the Western world. Why not devote our attention abroad, and campaign for human rights on a global scale?
I acknowledge that by writing this article, I make myself a target for criticism from others within the LGBT sphere. However, the fact that it is even a risk to do so, is evidence that this once safe place has been captured by malicious, deconstructionist, and harmful ideology. This modern woke dogma has captured the hearts of many and given us an authoritarian rulebook on how we should exhibit kindness. Why has our focus shifted to keeping up with ever-changing social standards, when the antagonism they cause detracts from what should be very basic principles of how to treat other humans? When did we lose sight of respecting one another as individual human beings, instead of as homogenised representatives of identity groups? Every person you meet is a wealth of knowledge, experience, and character, that will be new to you, and you to them. You can love people and have incredible, fulfilling relationships of all kinds, not despite your differences, but because of them.
This article isn’t an attack on any individual people for the beliefs they hold, but rather on the ideas themselves that have become prolific throughout our culture and derailed the mission of Pride. If you’re offended or defensive, I can only say that perhaps our perspectives don’t align. But consider this. Do you see any inconsistencies in your own movement? Are you so thoroughly convinced of your beliefs, that mild scepticism towards them is felt as bigotry? Do you sincerely believe that you are protecting lives, or are you pandering?
Is this really what the fight for human rights looks like?
Petition Iranian authorities to investigate the murder of Ali Fazeli Monfared murder
Donate to:
International Railroad for Queer Refugees (IRQR), supporting Iranian LGBT refugees seeking asylum in Turkey.
Let’s Walk Uganda addressing MSM* homelessness, HIV/AIDS awareness and advocacy for policy change regarding MSM rights in Uganda.
Háttér Society for counselling, legal aid and HIV/AIDS support in Hungary.
OutRight International working to research, document, defend, and advance LGBT human rights in many regions worldwide.
The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association to support human rights defenders around the world, and to raise awareness of LGBT human rights violations at international fora, including the UN Human Rights Council.
*MSM = Men who have sex with men