Every year, on the first day of June, fate and biology join hands to punch me in the stomach. Not only is June 1 the start of Pride Month — a 30-day celebration and reveration of all things queer — but it’s also my birthday. And no matter how much I prepare for the confluence of these two events, there will inevitably be some part of myself, throughout the day, that feels like I’m doing it wrong. I’m not being gay enough to honor my forefathers, foremothers and forepeople. I’m not turning another year older by holding a raucous celebration with 50 of my loved ones. I’m not honoring myself.
No one makes these demands of me, and yet, I feel burdened by them anyway — by the opaque feeling of obligation on a day my birthright says I should have none. The older I get, the less persistent these emotions are. But when they hit, and they always do, it’s a psychic whallop. For a brief moment in time, I’m questioning everything tangentially related to my dual identities (gay guy and June-born person), which can be an exhausting emotional shift when you spend 11 out of 12 months of the year blissfully ignorant of what others in your community might perceive as shortcomings.
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Why is it that I have few close friends who are gay men, but I can’t seem to stop pulling women of all kinds into my orbit? Do I not make enough of an effort to keep in touch with my fellow gay men, and if so, why? Why aren’t my 30s making me more wistful toward the community I was born into? Am I being wilfully ignorant of some broader complex I have about my sexuality, or am I just growing further into my own self, and thus, less inclined to align with whatever picture of gayness I perceive “Pride” to be for? I can picture myself prattling on about this to the straight woman I bring to the gay bar — a crime that is, to many of my kind, punishable by stoning in the lobby of a Barry’s Bootcamp — and having an old, strict gay man interrupt us: “So who, pray tell, is Pride for and not for?”
Pride is a feeling, not a fixed state. You can’t name it or force it into a box, and if you do, the result will always read as disingenuous.
That’s just the thing: I’m not sure, and I think it’s become difficult for many queer people to understand. Is Pride still a protest, or is it a product? One might argue that there’s some reality where Pride can be both of these things — where those who see it as an active demonstration of queer visibility can mingle with the people looking to wear cutoff jean shorts and get day drunk. But it’s especially difficult to ignore the fact that protest and product are inherently at war when the rainbow-patterned Lockheed Martin float comes cascading down the parade route. I don’t care if Chase Bank slaps a Pride flag on their logo, or even if they make the logo look like a sphincter. Any publicly traded company truly interested in celebrating the queer community should make a sizable contribution to a charity, put out a press release, and stay the hell away from any social events.
As much as I think most queer people wish they could distance themselves from Pride’s commodification, the increased corporatization of our month is impossible to ignore. Pride is intended to be a celebration of whatever queerness means to the individual. But such heavy commercial appeal erodes all that singularity, leaving queer people to fend for themselves in defining and celebrating their identities, apart from the pinkwashing. But those interpretations don’t always come easily. Sometimes, being part of a community can be an extremely isolating, lonely experience.
When expressing some version of these feelings to a new acquaintance I’d met at a friend’s joint Pride-birthday party a couple of years back, he asked if I’d ever been to Fire Island. When I replied that I hadn’t, his face turned white — almost as white as the island’s predominant guests. “You have to go,” he said, grabbing my shoulder, as if he were trying to communicate the desire through physical transference. “It’s gay Mecca. And so rich in history! Fire Island is like traveling back in time, before Pride became a corporate event. Everything there is still just as it was in the ’70s and ’80s.” A wisecrack about the real estate prices popped into my head, but I held my tongue. However, I can’t say that the steep cost of a Fire Island weekend hasn’t been one of the primary factors keeping me from boarding the ferry and sloshing around the Long Island Sound. Lodging is one thing, the cost of food and drink is another entirely. (Maybe if Chase Bank really wants to make a difference, they’ll buy the entire island and subsidize it for queer people! Kidding.)
After the party died down and I boarded the subway back to my apartment, I spotted people headed home from Pride celebrations of their own, or perhaps just heading out for the night. Everyone seemed jovial, leaving me to glare at my reflection in the dark train window, between stations, wondering what exactly my deal was. Why does the idea of Fire Island or any of its equally gay attractions fail to spark any interest in me? I can’t, at the very least, muster a curiosity for its storied past as a haven for gay men pre-AIDS crisis? I burst into tears whenever I see a vintage photo strip of gay men, kissing or looking lovingly at one another in the privacy of a photobooth. These small yet radical acts of love overwhelm me with emotion. Yet, Fire Island as a concept produces nothing more than a toy monkey clanging its cymbals in my brain. “You just have to go to really get it,” friends still tell me. I look in their eyes, and I believe it’s true for them. For myself, I remain unconvinced.
Pondering these things at all is its own exhausting experience, filled with more questions. Am I so cruelly esoteric that mainstream ideas of gayness do nothing for me? Is there a stick planted firmly in my ass that should be removed and replaced with something that aligns more with my sexuality? Does acting this way make me feel special or better than those who can be more readily free of such hangups? If a non-insignificant portion of my writing is dedicated to the importance of community and the places we find it, why is it that, when surrounded by gay people, I never feel more alone? Am I an imposter, a fraud, jealous or just a jerk?
In all of my years of self-examination — and in writing this very piece — I’ve come to determine that I’m resistant to anyone projecting their definitions or ideas of gayness onto me. This, I believe, is the product of growing up a digital native. We were encouraged to be ourselves on social media, to curate Tumblr blogs, click-clack the afternoon away in LiveJournal diaries, or design MySpace pages just the way we wanted them, hacking the code to make everything appear just so. When the founders of social media platforms and their VC backers realized self-expression could be commodified, the ad-driven, data-based new experiences were a betrayal. “Our algorithm has determined that you’re a giant f*g. Would you like to see more fierce slayage?”
Maybe! But maybe not, too. Can anyone be allowed to choose their own experiences anymore, to pursue the things that make them feel most like themselves, without having their personality computed into ones and zeroes, or turned into marketing fodder for a brand that doesn’t actually care if they live or die? I realize I’m posing a lot of queries here and not following them up with any concrete answers, but that’s because I don’t really have the answers myself. I don’t know what Pride looks like to me; I only know what it feels like.
I’ve spent my life feeling that the way I express my queerness doesn’t align with what so many people think it should be. As many strides as we’ve made toward progress, sometimes people still can’t register gayness unless you drop that hip and loosen that wrist, metaphorically or otherwise.
The contours of Pride appear in my mind whenever I’m watching a movie that I feel speaks to my own uniquely homosexual sensibilities, which frequently change. Sometimes, I feel most gay when I’m strolling outside feeling the breeze against my skin, like I’m experiencing the joy in a way that only I can, balanced with my own unique burdens and comforts. And I will also occasionally feel my cells inside my big gay body start to strobe with rainbow color when I chow down on gay junk food, like this Demi Lovato dance track that became my most-played song of last August.
But what I do think most queer people can agree on is that Pride is a feeling, not a fixed state. You can’t name it or force it into a box, and if you do, the result will always read as disingenuous. Four years ago, before I came to Salon, I wrote about Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul” in what I thought was a voicey, measured analysis of the song’s immediate danceability. That Beyoncé had released her highly anticipated house single during Pride Month was, naturally, referenced in the article, but it was far from the crux of the piece. I was glad that the writing avoided sounding like a parody of a tweet. (Or this abhorrent, gay-pandering Meghan Trainor press release I’ll reference any chance I get.) But when the piece was published, I shuddered at the headline: “Beyonce’s ‘Break My Soul’ just broke the internet and — hell yeah — is a Pride Month dance bop.”
The headline, which I admittedly should’ve pushed back against, sounded so completely unlike me that I was embarrassed to post it anywhere, choosing instead to trade mortified texts with my friends who understood the sentence to be about as far from Coleman as you could get. I’d filed the piece with a suggested headline saying the song was “a sledgehammering return to the dance floor,” a phrase that, you know, actually indicated how the song sounds.
But maybe that was simply too normal, too accurately descriptive to be written by a gay guy. I’ve spent my life feeling that the way I express my queerness — something that, explicit in the text or not, informs every piece of writing I’ve ever produced — doesn’t align with what so many people think it should be. As many strides as we’ve made toward progress, sometimes people still can’t register gayness unless you drop that hip and loosen that wrist, metaphorically or otherwise.
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In my days as a baby gay, the go-to platitude around being queer was that our differences are what make us special. When I was a teenager struggling to understand exactly who I am, I took that to heart. And I still believe it. But humanity’s many variations don’t sell ads. They don’t drive clicks. And they don’t make money. The discrepancies between gay and straight are far more marketable when they’re blasted into a blaze of word salad headline glory.
And you know what? Good. Let’s keep it that way. Pride isn’t homogeneous, and no brand should be able to make more money because of it. Pride Month shouldn’t be a means to an end. The goal of Pride is not to make queer people equal — or even palatable — to their straight counterparts. I understand this rubs some people the wrong way, but Pride shouldn’t be about normalization; that’s just the happy byproduct. Pride is as much a celebration of personality as it is identity. Those two things may be symbiotically and inextricably linked. But it’s personality that shapes who we are, and provides us with the qualities that set us apart from others, making us truly exceptional. Pride is a state of mind, an interest, a wig, a favorite group of friends, a pair of sunglasses, a movie you love or a song you can’t stop playing. It’s the joy you feel from living authentically.
Right now, for me, Pride feels like being moved by the unexpectedly poignant lyric in the random afrohouse song Rihanna recorded for last year’s “Smurfs” movie soundtrack: “How can so familiar be so brand new? Just met you tonight, but you feel like a friend of mine.” I’ve tried for a year to get some of my closest acquaintances to understand why this song is so great, why I find it so bizarrely beautiful, but few do. And that’s OK, too. Because sometimes, when it comes on shuffle while I’m out for a walk, it makes me smile and shed a tear, thankful that I am whatever kind of gay I am that I get to love something so strange, so much. I don’t think that makes me special, or different, or better, but I do think it makes me who I am: me.
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The post Pride Month makes me feel like an imposter appeared first on Salon.com.
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Hello, my name is Asma E Nur. I am a tech blogger.
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