May 18, 2007  |  By: JULIE R. ENSZE  | COMMENTS     

SOME SUNDAY MORNING this June, my wife and I will wake up and say, “Well, we really should go to Pride today, eh?” It will be a beautiful, sunny Sunday or maybe an oppressively hot and humid one. We’ll feel obligated to join in the Pride activities of the day, but we won’t want to.

Those conflicting feelings are not a consequence of our individual malaise. Rather, they are a result of a challenge facing our movement right now. Our sense of obligation comes from our desire and commitment to be counted and recognized as queer. We believe in gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender visibility. We want our voices to be part of a larger chorus of queer voices that insist on equality under the law. We want our voices to demand full recognition of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people as humans under the law — in the United States and around the world.

Our ambivalence about participating in the local Pride celebration is that our participation does not seem to move us, individually or collectively, closer to reaching our equality objectives. Why participate in something that has a fuzzy vision and a dubious outcome?

Our participation does not fill us with joy and wonder. Why do something with our free time that isn’t fun?

AS A COMMUNITY, we’ve been celebrating Pride for more than 30 years. The story of the rebellion at the Stonewall bar is a potent one that must be shared across generations as new people come out. This is one of the important contributions of Pride: it retells and remembers our history. In my experience, the best Pride celebrations are those that combine cultural celebrations and history retellings with contemporary queer politics and opportunities to share and present positive queer identities.

The worst Pride celebrations, on the other hand, are tools for corporations to reach new consumers. They are celebrations that are devoid of history and culture and celebrate instead money, alcohol and drugs. Most Pride celebrations fall somewhere between these two extremes.

I don’t think that the solution is to try and tip all Pride celebrations more to the former. The solution is to radically reconsider our public celebrations. The fact of the matter is that we need public communal expression of our communities and our identities. I’m not arguing that we end Pride.

I’m arguing that we need to rethink Pride and how it might be remade to reflect our contemporary circumstances and our future needs.

To begin, let’s not start by asking who would fund it. That thinking leads us to extensive corporate sponsorship. We need to set out our agenda and our own vision, not adopt one from a corporation. For the first time in my life, there is ample money in the queer community from individual donors without looking to corporations.

Let’s begin by asking what sort of commemoration our history needs. And let’s expand the notion of our history to include not only our rebellion at the Stonewall bar, but also our history prior to 1969 and our history beyond the United States. After determining what we need, let’s ask what we want.

I WANT A commemoration that is historically grounded and provides a vision of liberation for all queer people. I want a commemoration that celebrates all queer people and our cultural contributions. I want a commemoration that is festive for queer people and educational for interested non-queer people. I want a celebration that teaches me something about queer history and culture. I want a celebration that brings me joy, happiness, and yes, even glee.

I want a celebration that articulates a vision and a strategy for queer liberation for today and for 40 years into the future; I want that celebration to inspire me, and others, to work to achieve our shared vision for liberation. I want to participate in this celebration soon. Let’s begin to create the vision and the leadership to make such a celebration happen.