Should We Be Talking About 'Straight Pride' At All?

By Evan Ross Katz


What to do as soon as satire becomes reality?


Nearly three years back, on July 5, 2016, writer-performer Dylan Marron released a video through Serious.TV titled “Happy Heterosexual Pride Day!” “As an ally, I wanted to celebrate the brave commitment of straight folks to love out loud in a global that encourages them to do so,” Marron quipped. Although right now, against a backdrop of continued dismantlement of LGBTQ+ protections In the United States, what was once parody has become a heavily-contested debate. It all began on Tuesday night, any time news broke that a handful of Boston residents identifying themselves as "Super Happy Fun America” were making preparations for a so-called "Straight Pride Parade" to be contained August 31 — or so they claimed.


The event organizer Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman, whom the Day-to-day Beast describes as a “notorious right-winger,” mentioned the event intended to poke fun at “identity politics.” The story rapidly blew up. “What a joke,” the actress Rosanna Arquette wrote on Twitter. “Straight Pride Parade????? FUCK OFF!!!!!!!!,” wrote the musical group Smash Mouth on Twitter, accumulating over 340,000 likes on the post — nearly four times the quantity of their total following. Chris Evans opted to call out the organizers directly, although his statement, despite its 348,000 likes, caused a controversy all its own by inferring Chapman and his ilk were closeted. (“This is a worn out old trope also it essentially blames gay people for our own problems,” one Twitter user noted in response to Evans.) Others were quick to figure out Chapman as a member of an anti-Semitic, alt-right sort called Resist Marxism. By Wednesday night, firmly embedded in the ether, the conversation was parodied by Stephen Colbert on The Late Show.


However as Keep It host Ira Madison pointed out, the tone of those responses made it hard to tell if people were actually taking the event seriously or just paying also much attention to trolls, and running the risk of making the detractors feel legitimized, or at least like they succeeded at derailing the more essential conversation. Online, such intrerruptions are usually called shitposting, in which Trump supporters and other trolls dangle so several carrots that people don’t know where to look. In this case, the so-called Straight Pride conversation was deployed right at the best of actual Pride month, thus asking people concentrate on the rights of people who have, historically, never been so disenfranchised.


So much of LGBTQ+ existence revolves around the idea of making and creating space — even for those who have been robbed of it in the past. Veteran activist and journalist Ann Northrop still remembers going with her first “real girlfriend” to her first Pride parade in the late 1970s. “We stood on the sidelines and watched,” Northrop tells MTV News. “It probably took me another couple of years to jump in.”


Let that sink in: especially for some of the people who fought for that space, it still took time to feel comfortable publicly celebrating it. Perhaps because there was and is still work to be done. Same-sex marriage was only made legal at a federal level in 2015; last month, the Home of Representatives finally moved to pass the Equality Act, which would provide protections against discrimination to LGBTQ+ people. Meanwhile, the Senate is stalling on that bill, and the Trump administration is rapidly attempting to dismantle as several protections of LGBTQ+ people as they can.


To that end, it’s understandable why Northrop would call a “straight pride” parade “depressing” and “insulting.” Over email, she told MTV News, “[Chapman is] a bigot. He doesn’t deserve a serious response. He should be didn't think about … in case you think this deserves more serious attention, I can go further, however I really don’t wish to give an attention-seeking racist any more oxygen.”


She’s not alone, either: Boston Mayor Marty Walsh rejected to give the event any breath,  recognizing that to disavow it divides our attention from those actually celebrating Pride month. “Every year Boston hosts our annual Pride Week, where our city comes with each other to celebrate the diversity, strength, and acceptance of our LGBTQ community. This is a special week that resembles Boston’s values of love and inclusion, which are unwavering,” he wrote in a statement to the Washington Post.


According to the Day-to-day Beast, a source familiar with the Boston government’s permitting process says Sahady had not been granted an event allow so far. However even if he is, will anyone attend?


And either way, should we be talking about it all?


Like the dudes who tried to begin a “Intentional Men’s Day” on International Women’s Day back in March and the #AllLivesMatter slogan adopted by those unable to grasp the meaning in back of Black Lives Matter, a “Straight Pride” parade only reinforces a false sense of scarcity, the idea that shining a light on one thing means something or someone else falls into the darkness. That’s simply not the case.


It expenses nothing as soon as you protect the lived experience and identity of trans people, any time whenever you recognize and celebrate the weddings of same-sex couples, any time as soon as you make space for other people to share their joy out loud. Nevertheless as soon as you police other people’s true selves, it can cost lives. Merely showing up to or supporting Pride — actual Pride, LGBTQ+ pride — this year can serve as a deterrent any task to delegitimize our visibility. It’s that easy. Let’s validate our own community as a substitute opposed to expending energy to combat those attempting to invalidate us. It might be frustrating, and even traumatizing, to witness that lack of empathy from people attempting to garner empathy toward themselves, to cast themselves as victims once they’ve been the perpetrators all along. Nevertheless we have to keep on moving.


As activist Peter Staley, who marched in his first Pride parade while in ACT UP’s coming-out moment in 1987, puts it: “Our movement has routinely benefited from the foolishness of our enemies.”