Proud Peoples

This post was submitted by Philip Clark, in response to our request for your thoughts on Pride.

My friend left her Pride Guide in my car right before I was ready to jot down some thoughts about gay pride. Figured I’d look at it for inspiration—oops! A two hundred page, rainbow-tinted commercial orgy was not what I needed to see as I started. So here are some highly biased ideas about why we actually don’t have enough gay pride. I’ll pick just three propositions:

Proud Peoples Know Their History:

When I tell new gay or lesbian acquaintances that I research gay history, I am by now used to the question, “What does that mean?” This is always accompanied by a look of slight bewilderment that I do not think would be present if I said I studied black history or Jewish history or Irish history. The idea of blacks or Jews or the Irish—of a race, a religion, a national identity—having a collective cultural past is so obvious as to be self-evident. That does not seem to translate to a GLBT cultural history for the gays and lesbians of my own age who I speak to. Occasionally, I get the reaction, “So you mean, like, who was sleeping with who?” That’s absolutely a piece of GLBT history, and not one to be taken lightly: we are certainly bound by a shared, frequently outlawed desire, a romantic and sexual history that must be uncovered as it has all too often been hidden or ignored. But to see gay and lesbian history as simply the history of sexual acts, a catalog of who did what to whom, is too narrow a vantage point.

Attempting to describe to my questioners what I really mean by GLBT history is a challenge because even modern touchstone events are absent in the collective consciousness of so many of the gay people I speak to. The Oscar Wilde trials, the role of gays in the Holocaust, the Stonewall riots, the 1993 March on Washington (to choose just one): all these, if mentioned, are met with a blank stare, and they should just be some of the most obvious reference points in a shared cultural knowledge. This gap indicates an impoverished community. To quote the epigraph of a favorite book of mine (Hal Borland’s When the Legends Die), “When the legends die, the dreams end. When the dreams end, there is no more greatness.” If even these legendary events, which could be rallying points in celebrating the history of our people, are inadequately remembered, with what is the gay community left to create pride in the hearts of its new generations?

Fight this tide! Celebrate gay pride weekend by going to find out more about some event or aspect of GLBT history. When you hit the streets, pick a bookstore—Lambda Rising, G Books, Second Story, Books for America, Capitol Hill Books, or even your local big box chain store if you must—and grab a book that looks interesting from the gay history section. Then share the book and what you know with others. In such small ways is a history created.

Proud Peoples Do Not Harm Themselves with Drugs or (Excessive) Drink:

Q: Does public gay social space exist in Washington D.C. which is not predicated on alcohol consumption? A: No. (With a couple of exceptions soon to be noted.)

Q: Why?

Here, I begin to spin my wheels a bit, because I do not have an adequate answer, only a collection of theories and possibilities. Some of these, if true, make me profoundly uncomfortable. But here’s one of those possibilities:

In his pioneering gay “psychohistory” The Stonewall Experiment (1995), longtime gay writer, editor, and activist Ian Young discusses the traditional ghettoization of the gay community in the cities. He quotes from Carl Wittman’s 1971 Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto (which I was fortunate enough to find a copy of in my high school (!) library when I was a teenager), where Wittman argues that “By the tens of thousands, we fled small towns where to be ourselves would endanger our jobs and any hope of a decent life; we have fled from blackmailing cops, from families who disowned or “tolerated” us; we have been drummed out of the armed services, thrown out of schools, fired from jobs, beaten by punks and policemen….And we have formed a ghetto, out of self-protection.” Young goes on to point out that many gays and lesbians have “suffered abuse and ostracism because of their sexuality…Isolated gay boys from small towns [arrived in the cities] lacking the discernment and abilities necessary to maintain real friendships or meaningful ties. Alienated and adrift, they formed an excellent target group for the marketing of a new kind of urban lifestyle” that included alcohol and drugs in heavy amounts.

This is a ridiculously brief and grossly simplified summary of Young’s much more complex argument, which is highly worth the time to read in full. Nowadays, I suspect it describes a much narrower slice of the urban gay community than it did 25 and 30 years ago. But in some ways, it holds. In the 1960s, gay bars were almost exclusively Mafia-run dives; polite society shunted even semi-open homosexuals into the cities, and from there underground into the sleazier and less-centrally located parts of town. Bars were the only acceptable social option for a ghettoized people.

Now gays and lesbians are more integrated into the wider society. Presumably, we have many more options than older generations of gays and lesbians had. So why is virtually all our public gay social space still in bars and clubs? Why is there enough addictive behavior that one of the first public programs The D.C. Center had to run was crystal meth working groups? If we were truly proud, would so many members of our community, especially the young, be pickling themselves with alcohol? Walk down 17th Street at 2 a.m.—why, it’s puddles of puke! Charming. Let’s give the frat boys in Adams Morgan a run for their money.

On a positive note, a couple of the few spreads in the Pride Guide that weren’t packed with advertising listed all the parade contingents and festival booths. Health organizations, religious groups, professional organizations, community groups, sports teams, and theatres: there is a tremendous diversity of smaller groups creating their own vibrant, if disconnected, social spaces. And The D.C. Center is expanding its cultural programming, which promises great things for our community. There’s a lot of hope for an increase in alcohol-free social space. Head to the booths of these organizations at the street fair and let’s encourage this.

Proud Peoples Help and Honor Their Oldest and Youngest Members:

I had been wondering why so many seemingly secure gay men of my acquaintance are obsessively negative when considering their own aging. Then I remember that most gay men over 35 are treated like a breed apart by younger gays and I have the answer to my own question. I might be a little cynical after hearing one too many jokes about how Windows should be called “Widows.”

I’ve been a trifle peeved when I’ve heard that the students I work with are trying to sneak into clubs underage because they don’t feel like they have anywhere else to go to learn about being gay. I recommend SMYAL to them, the same organization I attended for a year or so when I was in high school, but other than that, what are the options? (This is not to dismiss SMYAL, which does wonderful work, just to hope that there might be a broader range of possibilities.) There are no obvious mentoring systems set up to help gay youth and because of concerns of being seen as Chester the Molester, I doubt too many gay men would be willing to serve as platonic mentors to kids under the age of consent.

So gay youth don’t have enough resources and there isn’t enough cross-cultural exchange going on between younger and older gays—which could be why our history isn’t getting passed along, as referenced above. Please tell me that the lesbian community doesn’t have this problem?

For gay pride, let’s make a resolution to break through the age barriers whenever possible and create friendships with more people outside of our age groups.


I’m firmly coming down on the side of having and showing as much gay pride as possible. I just don’t think that getting pelted with beads while watching the parade is necessarily the best way to show it. I’ll be out there with my friends cheering as the half-naked cowboys and stately drag queens make their way down the streets, but there has to be active community change in order to earn real pride.

I hope you’ll take the opportunity to respond to what I’ve written here, either by leaving a comment or by contacting me off the site at philipclark@hotmail.com. Whether it’s to agree, continue the discussion, or tell me that I’m a(n) [insert expletive here], conversation is always better than stagnation. GLBT people have been through way too much not to push ourselves the extra, improving step.