Why we still need gay pride

Words by Richard Burnett.

Some years ago, the term “post-gay” was coined to describe a world where Gay Pride and Gay Villages no longer matter. Well, in North America, that day is upon us.

It’s not just Pride organizations across in smaller Canadian cities like London and Ottawa that are struggling, it’s major Pride parades and Gay Villages in cities like Seattle and New Orleans that are redefining themselves and what it means to be gay in urban centres.

Just look at the evidence.

In a widely published 2007 Associated Press story headlined “Gay Villages disappearing,” NYC author Don Reuter, researching a book on the rise and fall of a dozen U.S. gay neighbourhoods, rhetorically asks, “What makes these neighbourhoods gay? Not much.”

Reuter predicts that outside New York, San Francisco and a handful of other gay meccas like Montreal, neighbourhoods with a significant gay presence will not survive – including, Reuter contends, gay communities in Seattle, Philadelphia and New Orleans. In fact, when I went to New Orleans to visit friends last Halloween, I discovered that the French Quarter’s gay community that still frequents Bourbon Street’s historic “fruit loop” on Bourbon Street has splintered into three or four satellite “gaybourhoods” outside the French Quarter since Hurricane Katrina.

While North American gay communities have managed to save several iconic gay bars from closing in the last few years – like NYC’s Stonewall Inn, originally slated to close in 2006 after it became an international landmark following the 1969 Stonewall Riots – others like the famed Boom Boom Room in Laguna Beach are closing, while New York’s famed Roxy has already closed.

The reason? Entire cities have finally become our playgrounds. In Montreal there are gay nights in bars and nightclubs in much of the city. And in June 2011 the popular Royal Phoenix Bar (5788 St- Laurent, corner Bernard) became the first gay bar in Montreal’s bohemian Mile End district.

But that new reality is also breeding an apathetic post-gay attitude.

Even Montreal’s gay community – whose metropolitan population Tourisme Montreal estimates tops 450,000, and whose 1996 edition of their Divers/Cité Gay Pride parade is credited with giving Montreal’s Gay Village the momentum it needed to become a choice international gay destination – is going through growing pains.

In 2006, Divers/Cité spun off their expensive non-profit Pride parade and community day into a new, separate organization called Célébrations LGBTA Montréal because a 2004 CROP survey reported 76 per cent of festival-goers didn’t attend the parade and 25 per cent of parade-goers didn’t attend the rest of their weeklong festival.

As Paris-based Têtu magazine asked in a cover story, “Is Gay Pride still necessary?” It’s a legit question in countries like Canada and France, and clearly Divers/Cité saw the writing on the wall.

“Pride organizations must redefine themselves or become obsolete,” says Suzanne Girard, executive director and co-founder of Divers/Cité and past-president of InterPride, the International Association of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex Pride Coordinators.

In other words, since the first-ever Pride parade was held in NYC in June 1970 to commemorate the Stonewall Riots, Pride organizations – and increasingly the gay communities they serve – have become victims of the gay liberation movement’s success. How else to explain that many Pride organizations across North America are in deeply in debt and still most gays and lesbians don’t give a shit? How else can one explain local apathy?

So looking for answers on the eve of Stonewall’s 40th anniversary in June 2009, I visited the Stonewall Inn for the first time – a pilgrimage of sorts, really – on Christopher Street in NYC.

“People still come from around the world to take photos in front of the Stonewall,” says author David Carter, whose 2004 book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution remains the definitive account of the six-day riots. “The exterior has hardly changed at all since 1969.”

The Stonewall was originally built in 1843 as stables and was never a hotel. When the stables were gutted by fire in the 1960s, it reopened on March 18, 1967, as the Stonewall.

In those days police routinely raided gay bars in big gay metropolises like Montreal and New York (the first recorded gay establishment in North America was Moise Tellier’s “apples and cake shop” in Old Montreal in 1869, where men met to have sex).

“Just being gay was a heroic activity,” NYC poet John Giorno, first superstar of the Warhol Factory and William Burroughs’ best friend, now age 75, told me over lunch once. “I may have been called a fag or a queer but I was determined nothing was going to stop me. It became an idea to champion, especially when I met Burroughs and Ginsberg.”

As far as I’m concerned, being gay is still very much an idea to champion. “There will always be Pride parades!” says Suzanne Girard of Divers/Cité. “You need them for the youth. They will always need to come out and it’s always hard.”

Even Pride veterans need to know Pride still exists, even if they don’t attend the parade themselves.

Because, at the end of the day, our Pride parades and “gaybourhoods” remain fragile, precious and essential. They are important because they are still the only places where LGBT people feel safely part of a majority in a world that for the most part still hates us.

Yes, it is true Montrealers live in a gay-positive city. But always remember, tolerance is not acceptance – it is hypocrisy.

Read Richard Burnett’s POP TART blog for The Montreal Gazette at http://blogs.montrealgazette.com/category/montreal/pop-tart/.

You can also read Burnett’s national queer-issues column and blog Three Dollar Bill online at http://www.bugsburnett.blogspot.com.

Filed under News by Guest Contributor on December 06, 2011