Observation #5 Why Pride Matters
On every sidewalk, in every restaurant, gallery, bar, café and business in this city there is someone profoundly, singularly, projecting and defining what it means to be queer.
Today I am in Greenwich Village, sitting under the trees at the NYC AIDS Memorial Park. There is a small garden here looking over at the St Vincent’s Triangle, a vast latticed steel canopy of white inverted triangles. The heat today is oppressive and even the sparrows are sluggish in their search for crumbs leftover from the lunchtime crowd. I stop here on my way to the West Village to buy groceries. It is where St Vincent’s Hospital once stood, the medical centre at the heart of the story of AIDS in New York City during the early 1980s and the place where gay men first came, suffering from a mysterious new disease. They opened the first HIV ward here and the the park was constructed in recognition of those who lost their lives and the people who cared for them, the doctors who strived to find ways to cure them and the allies and campaigners who advocated for them. It is a peaceful place to reflect.
There are still many LGBTQ+ people living in this part of Manhattan and I often wonder when I see older men and women passing me in the street, what they have experienced here. Actions that have unknowingly changed lives for so many across the world. I catch a cheap happy hour martini at the deliciously unspoiled Julius a few blocks away, where a legendary ‘sip-in’ was staged to protest the owners’ continually throwing out their gay clientele. And of course, round the corner, where the anger simmering in the hearts of the queer community exploded in a riot outside the Stonewall Inn. All of these are landmarks in the collective narrative of our history. Moments of which we should be proud. But what they are not, is the rungs of a ladder. We are not rising upwards. Nor perhaps should we want to. Being different is to be celebrated and we should always fight to it keep that way.
I went to my first London Gay Pride in 1985, on a bus from Scotland, dressed in denim and doc martens with a peroxide flattop haircut, clean white socks, condoms and Edmund White’s Boy’s Own Story stashed in my Army & Navy store knapsack. I wasn’t particularly political, but I do remember there were Welsh miners with their banners at the front of the march. It was a fight for visibility, equal rights and justice and the freedom to live our lives without prejudice. The rain, I recall, eventually sent me running for the nearest gay pub and into the arms of an art student from Brighton.
I am proud of the battles we won. But I can also hear myself on a reverential time loop. It’s so easy to sentimentalise the past. To lament that we were part of some golden age of resistance, placards waving. In fact, we are all driven by circumstance, necessity being the mother of invention. HIV forced us to hold a mirror up to ourselves and we just had to fight to find a way to survive. We did our bit and struggled on.
And now today in the heart of New York at a time when the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, particularly trans people, are being so severely threatened, I question if I did enough back then? Honestly, I was only too glad to come out of the 1980s unscathed, surfing on a sense of relief from the endless misery of HIV and Thatcherism. I quickly got lost in the wide-eyed, ecstasy-driven, celebratory years of the 1990s and like so many others, I reached out for the glitter-ball lifestyle with enthusiasm, defiant and carefree, emerging from the mythical Trade nightclub at Sunday lunchtimes, shirtless and trolleyed.
We took what was on offer, but that should never have been enough. There was a blind faith in the gift of ‘tolerance’ we had been granted by society. In hindsight, the promise was always too thin, too indistinct. I never questioned closely enough how the others within our communities would be left, and as I came down from the highs and retreated to the safety of middle-class liberal values, I met a boy, got married and considered parenting.
Now here in my sixth decade in New York, I am feeling proud again. Proud to be gay but proud to be queer too. I know lots of my peers don’t like the queer word. It’s too transgressive for some, too raw for others. And I well remember it as a slur spat across a street or from passing vehicles. But I relish the semantic heist of reappropriation. Queer has become both an act of defiance and a cultural definition. It represents what it means to be ‘other’, to grow and flourish whatever your identity, and to be proud of that.
On every sidewalk, in every restaurant, gallery, bar, café and business in this city there is someone profoundly, singularly, projecting and defining what it means to be queer. Straight people too because in some strange and wonderful alchemy, queer values have now become a refuge for anyone, who recognises the joy in difference, the vital creativity that brings this place alive, and wants to celebrate that. Perhaps away from Britain with its layers of social branding, I feel freer and no longer a duty to make anyone feel comfortable.
Queerness has always been central to cities. Throughout history, from Sparta and Athens to Vienna and Berlin, it is what has made the most interesting places thrive. This tangled mess of a city, where people of every determination and origin are thrown together, seems undaunted in showing its support of queerness. Everywhere I look there is the pride flag with its infinite possibilities of identity and desire, signifying openness and hope. It is a brand that proclaims you are welcome, whoever you are and wherever you are from.
Happy Pride!