Ghost Pride
Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash
Hey there everyone—
So I’ve been beavering away on a piece for y’all and then I had a sudden shock of awareness yesterday that what I was going to post this week is, er, not exactly a great vibe to set two days after Father’s Day. So I’m going to post that one next time, instead.
In the interim, I thought I’d tell you about something cool that’s happening with Pride this year in Portland, Oregon. Like many cities, Portland celebrates Pride in June. Pride happens in June to honor the Stonewall uprising of June 28, 1969. But this year, the committee that plans the Pride parade changed the date. We’re having our Pride parade in July.
The committee announced it was moving the parade to make room for full celebration and respect for Juneteenth, commemorating June 19th, 1865. The main idea behind this shift is that members of the queer community shouldn’t have to choose one aspect of their identities over another.
What’s notable about both Pride and Juneteenth is that they are celebrations of resilience and at the same time ways of collectively naming the presence of structural violence and oppression. They establish moments when people who are most directly targeted by violence can join with those who are present in solidarity, to reinforce the commitment to collective social transformation.
The committee noted a second reason for the switch—Father’s Day. In the past, the parade was intentionally timed to happen on Father’s Day because historically many gay people have been exiled from their families of origin when they come out. If you know the slang term “family,”—as in, “Do you think they’re family?”—that’s because the chosen family of queer culture promises to hold you, all of you, no matter what. But Portland (or some of the city at least) is experiencing a cultural shift. There’s all these gay people who want to spend Father’s Day with their dads, because their fathers accept and love them. They don’t want to choose between their families. Also, we’re a tiny place, and now our drag queens can go to San Francisco to perform and clean up, and then come back here and make some more money in July.
So there’s this moment of expansion happening here in Portland, updating our Pride. The problem is that since there’s no gay bat phone in Portland, a lot of people didn’t get the memo that the Pride parade isn’t ‘til next month. Plus, no one said what we’re supposed to do about the Pride events that normally happen on the same weekend as the parade. Does everything move? Do we celebrate, sort of, for two months?
I went to a gay bar on Saturday night to try to figure out if this past weekend was Pride or not, and the bartender said they’d had to cancel the drag show because the promoter was horrific. But they still closed the street, the music was banging, and a very brave individual, telling us she was trying to get drunk as fast as possible, was dancing on the stage by herself in a cheerleader outfit. “It’s Ghost Pride,” said the host at the restaurant I went to after the bar, “No one knows if it’s happening or not.”
On Sunday it was fifty degrees and pouring rain. I saw no folks in festive attire, no rainbow balloons, just people in galoshes and jackets tromping down the street, and families clearly celebrating Father’s Day scurrying from their cars into restaurants.
I’m curious to see how Portland learns to celebrate Juneteenth as a city, in a way that doesn’t commodify the day or appropriate its history. I’m wondering what the energy of Pride will feel like in July. I hope we will still be fierce, still be in solidarity with the rest of the country, the places where gay rights and bodies are more explicitly under assault. I hope it won’t be tepid, or ghostly, or feel like it’s less necessary because there are some gay people here who don’t experience explicit homophobia and violence. Mass celebrations are powerful: they create solidarity, they create relief, they demonstrate to the dominant culture the masses of people who do not necessarily want “inclusion,” if inclusion means being incorporated into a culture that was created without them.
To all who are celebrating this week, I raise my glass and toast you. To our nurses, who are striking this week for better wages, hours, and support, I hope for a swift victory.
Stay safe out there this week—
xo
Rebecca