Forget for a moment that the group behind Boston’s “straight pride” parade — last August — is populated by known bigots.
And for now, let us set aside the fact that the group emerged from another organization founded by a violent right-wing activist, currently facing felony assault charges in two states.
Even without that information, the mere existence of a “straight pride” parade as a thing should strike all reasonable people as absurd; which is why it makes perfect sense to the likes of commentator and Aryan Rage Barbie, Tomi Lahren.
That Lahren would find the concept of straight pride not only legitimate, but downright necessary tells us all we need to know about post-irony America.
Sadly, Lahren’s recent rant that “straight people aren’t allowed to parade their heterosexuality for all to see,” probably makes sense to more than we’d like to admit.
For instance, I’m certain it will ring true for those who lament the lack of a White History Month, conveniently overlooking the way in which most every month is exactly that already. Or those who wonder when their cable package will include a White Entertainment Network to rival BET because they can ignore how whiteness is normalized on most every other station on the dial.
Or the kinds of people who think “Happy Holiday” greetings, rather than “Merry Christmas,” are tantamount to an assault on their faith and indicative of a need for a new and “unashamed” Christianity.
In short, it will seem accurate to incredibly stupid people whose grasp of power dynamics is well beneath that of the typical 13-year old, and whose ability to discern basic social reality is questionable at best.
Because the suggestion that straight folks aren’t allowed to “parade their heterosexuality” is so demonstrably false as to require no rebuttal. Yet here I am, having to rebut it because… America.
As a practicing heterosexual, I can attest that we are allowed to flaunt it daily and do so.
We can hold our partner’s hand in public, or put up pictures of them in our workspaces or school lockers without hesitation.
We can do so without worrying that this basic display of affection might provoke indignation, looks of disgust, or violence, rooted in revulsion at our very being.
We can do so without concern that we could be fired from a job or denied one in the first place for such grandiose displays of blatant straightness.
We can go apartment or house hunting with our partner confident that no landlord or loan officer is going to discriminate against us solely on the basis of our sexuality, thereby denying us the opportunity to live where we wish.
If in the face of such privileges, we straights can still manage to be angry about not having an actual parade named for our sexuality, then pettiness has found its new poster children.
Clamoring for straight pride is like demanding that shopping centers set aside parking spaces for the able-bodied, and mark them as such, so we who are without a disability can let everyone know: These are ours.
It’s like asking why Habitat for Humanity doesn’t build mansions for the rich and thinking your question to be the ultimate example of “owning the libs,” rather than an almost flawless iteration of mind-numbing dumbshittery.
It’s like going to the hospital for the birth of your child and getting angry when they take your wife to the maternity ward, but fail to provide you and your buddies with a paternity ward in which to smoke cigars, fart and talk about football.
That anyone would find the calls for straight pride, or white pride, or any other dominant-group equivalents legitimate is testimony to the way privilege can prove debilitating despite its real benefits.
Those who have grown accustomed to hegemony — the unquestioned dominance of one’s own group and its perspective — experience pluralism as oppression. To share when you’ve never had to do so is a burden. It feels like loss: of position, of prestige, of normalcy.
That such ecumenism would still leave dominant group members with the lion’s share of power matters not. What matters is that their dominance would be less totalizing than before. And the slippage is what portends doom. Any diminution of control signals that the matriarchy is upon us, or the “homocracy,” or Sharia law, or “white genocide.”
Power and privilege render their recipients fragile, incapable of adaptation. While the marginalized have developed ways to survive and even thrive despite the obstacles, the favored have nurtured no such skills. And having failed to do so, they now find themselves ill-prepared for the world as it is.
It would be humorous were it not so tragic.
To miss the difference between organizing for inclusion and organizing for continued domination is astounding.
The first, after all, is equivalent to asking for a seat at the table, while the latter is akin to demanding the table for oneself, and insisting upon the right to exclude all others. Seeing these as the same because they are both rooted in identity-based organizing is like conflating a welcome mat with a No Trespassing sign because they both contain words, and one finds them outside of a house.
But perhaps I shouldn’t mock them.
It must be difficult to come to grips with the realization that the world is not like you; that you are not a prototypical human being; not the gold standard of normalcy; not special or better. You are one among many, and others whom you have sought to exclude, marginalize, or keep invisible are just like you in that they demand respect.
The difference being, yours (ours) has already been vouchsafed by the larger society. Asking for still more of it is redundant at best and supremacist at worst.
Until heterosexuals and cisgendered folks are being attacked and murdered for who we love and who we are, all talk of straight pride is more than tone-deaf. It is vile.
Perhaps when district attorneys start refusing to enforce domestic violence laws against heterosexual batterers (the way one Tennessee DA recently admitted to doing with regard to gay or lesbian abusers) because their marriages “aren’t real,” then it will make sense to demand “straight pride.”
But until that time, which will likely not come before the sun burns out, extinguishing all life on earth, what we straight folks need is not pride.
What we need is some perspective.
I’m an antiracism educator/author. I Facebook & tweet @timjacobwise, podcast at Speak Out With Tim Wise & post bonus content at patreon.com/speakoutwithtimwise
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This post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.
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