![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldWriting in the National Post, Dave Bidini authored a thoughtful article about Pride. At first, he writes, he was going to write an article critical of the excesses of Pride, specifically the festivity's more sexualized elements. But then, he changed his mind: this very open presentation, he argues, makes it possible for people who are themselves struggling to connect.
On numerous occasions, most recently at Pride-time last year, I've suggested that Pride can be best understood via Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque, the temporary suspension of normative relationships and ethics in favour of the inversion of these norms and a new sort of egalitarianism, the sort of thing that paradoxically reinforces normative values on account of this very temporariness. I still think I'm half-right.
Where I think I went wrong was in my interpretation of what Pride meant. The very existence of Pride--its openness, its size--demonstrates that the normative values of society have changed. The inverse of this spectacle is not hiding out; the inverse of this exceptional spectacle, of this energy and celebration, is normality.
On numerous occasions, most recently at Pride-time last year, I've suggested that Pride can be best understood via Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque, the temporary suspension of normative relationships and ethics in favour of the inversion of these norms and a new sort of egalitarianism, the sort of thing that paradoxically reinforces normative values on account of this very temporariness. I still think I'm half-right.
Where I think I went wrong was in my interpretation of what Pride meant. The very existence of Pride--its openness, its size--demonstrates that the normative values of society have changed. The inverse of this spectacle is not hiding out; the inverse of this exceptional spectacle, of this energy and celebration, is normality.
[A] friend wrote to tell me about her experiences at Pride, and how, without the outrageous media coverage, that kid in Brandon, Man., who is dealing with his or her sexuality, will never understand the joy and freedom exhibited, flesh or no flesh, during Pride week (I’m paraphrasing). So I changed my angle, reminding myself why I’d written my song in the first place: as a testament to the courage of “coming out,” to say nothing of the courage of heterosexuals to acknowledge and embrace that gesture.
The dildos and the beautiful men in leather shorts might still trouble me — wearing my long-standing pedigree as a white heterosexual male from the suburbs who didn’t meet my first gay person until I was 14 — but Pride is important because of its boldness, its volume, its pageantry. It’s hard to understand what it’s like on the other side of the fence, but the effort is worth saying what so many other close-minded people of my generation and cultural background won’t say: It makes us better, all of us.
Queer was written as a Prairie-rock anthem. Because the setting was a hockey game, I wanted to turn something traditional on its head. I thought that gay life and the national sport were two bedfellows that would never co-exist. But last Saturday, amid the rubber penises and fetish zippers, an appearance by one processionaire did more to crack through that heterosexual vestige than any lyric I might have written. It was Brian Burke, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ GM, walking in honour of his late son, Brendan, who, before his death, became one of the few openly gay members of the hockey heterocracy. His appearance was a strong, vital statement that supported something he’d said a few years ago: “I don’t know about any other team, but if a player is gay, he sure as hell is welcome to play for the Maple Leafs.” These words were strong, and Burke is as close to the male mainstream as any figure in the city. If he can change, perhaps all of us can change, too. Maybe, one day, being called a fag on the ice will be no worse than being called a cherry picker. Maybe they’ll feel comfortable enough on Church Street to one day march with their manager, too.
Before sending in my story, I received another message, from an old friend, on his birthday. He told me that when he first heard Queer, “I was 14, freaked out by my undeniable attraction to the boy in math class in my suburban Regina high school, and without much context for anything gay. It would be years before I would come out of the closet, but all through my teenage years I could go to that song and feel something very real from it. Some notion that there was understanding in the world, even if I was too scared to look for it at the time around me.”
