Once, Pride was Protest. Pride was Social Action. Pride was a Play for Justice. The whole Loud and Proud and Out in the Streets thing was a strategy to draw our eyes from the centre to the margins. Now it’s a party. It’s a celebration. It was one thing. Now it’s something else. Each thing lives inside its own neat box. One sits on a shelf with a label: Historical Pride. The other dances in the street.
#BLM came to Pride and put its Protest, and its Social Action, and its Play for Justice into the party box. Oops. That would be bad. People shouldn’t get angry at parties. It’s against the rules. We need rules. Without rules, our boxes would get full of crap that doesn’t belong in them. I don’t know about you, but when my orderly boxes get filled up with crap that doesn’t belong in them, I start to feel uncomfortable.
When the people from #BLM brought their anger to the party, it made me feel uncomfortable. I just want have fun. Don’t ask me to think, especially on a weekend. Worse yet: don’t ask me to empathize with your situation. For me to empathize with you would take a lot of imagination and emotional maturity. I’m not up to it. Just leave me with my doobie (is my age showing?) and let me shout incoherent shit at nobody in particular. That’s all I ask of the world.
The curious thing is that, after a smooth time at the Dyke March, the next day #BLM got its own boxes all mixed up. At the Pride Parade (I’ll post photos tomorrow), it held things up for half an hour and made demands of the Pride organizers not least of which was that Police should be prevented from marching in next year’s parade. People (mostly white?) went into conniptions, pointing out that the Police box has a lot of other crap in it, you know, police who are LGBTQ, police who are Black, police who are LGBTQ & Black, etc.
My impression is that everybody would like their boxes to be neat and orderly. The Pride organizers would like their boxes to be neat and orderly. #BLM would like its boxes to be neat and orderly. I’d certainly love it if my boxes were neat and orderly. There’s a phrase that describes this propensity to keep boxes neat and orderly: black and white thinking.
To mark all the black and white thinking that’s been swirling around the latest #BLM controversy, I decided to post only black and white photographs. I’m sure many of them would show better in colour, but one of the great features of black and white thinking is that denies people a richer view of their own experience.
To be fair, a moratorium on police in the parade is a good idea. So you know somebody who’s black or gay who serves on your local police force. Don’t try to forward that fact as proof that things are getting better. What kind of “contract” has your black or gay friend entered in order to function within the culture of that police force? Don’t know? Of course you don’t know. That information doesn’t exist. And a complete absence of transparency means that it won’t exist for a long time to come.
Personally, I don’t think #BLM went far enough. Let’s ban banks. Let’s ban the political hucksters right up to the PMO. Let’s ban that great bastion of regressive taxation, the Ontario Lottery & Gaming Corporation. How about Home Depot? Air Canada? They celebrate your Black body, your Gay body, your Oppressed body, but only as a site for marketing and winning votes. Once you strip away all the sponsors and political interests, what are you left with? Maybe five people walking down the street holding hands?
