Pride has to be the lamest ‘festival’ ever

I got into an argument on Facebook yesterday with a musician ‘friend’ (now former friend) called Justin whom I don’t think I’ve ever met - he added me years ago when I was active on the Prague music scene, perhaps thinking I might be useful to know one day. I didn’t even have to do anything to get into this argument, because he posted “I’m going to play at Prague Pride and anyone who has a problem with that can get the fuck out of my friends list”, so simply reading this I felt like I’d already been yelled at. I replied: “why is men being allowed into women’s spaces so important to you?”.

I don’t think Justin is gay, but he and a bunch of his friends - all male and heterosexual as far as I could tell - jumped on my comment to tell me how Pride is a celebration of love, and how intolerant and out of touch I am, or as Justin put it, what a “dick” I am. Well ha ha ha Justin, enjoy those Likes from your simple little friends, but I think not.

You could say I was being provocative, but I’d already been pre-provoked, and unfortunately the whole concept of modern Pride seems designed solely to provoke. Pride used to consist of a parade lasting a few hours, during which gay people would walk through a city dressed in their gayest and most colourful clothes, to show everyone that they are gay and they’re proud of it. Ok, good for them I guess. It’s true that homosexuality has been and still is illegal in some parts of the world, but it’s been legal where I’m from for my entire life, and it’s been legal in most places Pride is held for the entire lives of most of the participants, so it’s not really sticking it to the man in any meaningful sense. But traffic disruptions notwithstanding, there’s nothing wrong with having a parade if that’s your thing.

That’s not what Pride is now though; far from it. June is widely recognised as Pride Month but despite that, cities often hold their official Pride events outside this month. Prague Pride culminates in a parade, but it’s a whole week-long ‘event’, with a website and everything. From the look of the website you’d think it was a festival with music and stuff, and while there are some gigs, mostly around the weekend - a lot of which look suspiciously like standard DJ nights but with Queer in the name and Pride flags, or the more sinister ‘Progress Pride’ flags draped all over them - some of the activities barely pass as activities, like ‘Collective pudding eating with forks’, ‘Chess for everyone vol 4’, ‘Celebrating the bond: a gratitude walk with your dog’, and the very anticlimactic-sounding ‘Speed dating for asexuals’.

Yet somehow Prague Pride is an event, one that you are expected to buy tickets for (or even donate to!) and which corporate sponsors enthusiastically embrace with rainbow coloured logos absolutely everywhere. In fact, Pride seems to have a lot more to do with corporate branding than with anything else.

According to the Prague Pride website you can buy VIP tickets to this ‘event’, meaning that you can enjoy the ‘event’ in a special area with complimentary unlimited coffee courtesy of Mamacoffee, a MAC makeup station where you can perfect your ‘Pride look’, and seating provided by furniture retailer Bonami. Because nothing says ‘inclusivity’ like an exclusive VIP zone! The events that actually are organised are spread across the city, so God knows what you’re meant to do in the VIP area besides drink coffee and bask in your open-minded virtuousness - in private, of course.

Pride doesn’t have much to do with homosexuality any more either, because most Pride-branded things now celebrate being Queer, rather than gay. ‘Queer’ is an odd (you might even say queer) term: it was once a derogatory term for ‘gay’, used by people who definitely were expressing hostility towards homosexuality, but over the years and with the help of Queer Theory in academia muddying the water, it’s morphed into a nebulous term encompassing both sexuality and gender identity (another meaningless term), that pretty much anyone can claim for themselves. Much like ‘trans’, it’s not about what you do - like having homosexual relationships - but what you think about yourself, and as as result it ends up meaning nothing in practice.

On a fundamental level, what even is it about being Queer, or gay, or indeed any sexuality or gender identity, that one is supposed to be ‘proud’ of? Can I be proud to be straight? Pride is clearly not aimed at people like me, so does that mean I should be Ashamed instead? Or is everyone supposed to be proud of their sexuality, including the button-down straights? Why? Who cares who anyone else is attracted to? It’s a strange premise when you think about it, which is why you’re not supposed to - you’re supposed to applaud anyone who says they’re taking part in Pride, wait for others to applaud your applause, and if anyone questions it, chastise them for their callous refusal to toe the line.

And so I return to my inciting ‘provocation’, that my erstwhile friend’s enthusiasm for Pride is actually an enthusiasm for allowing men into women’s spaces. If you embrace Pride’s core tenet, that being Queer is a valid identity, then you must implicitly also accept that trans identities exist, with all the ‘rights’ that go with them. To pretend that these ‘rights’ don’t allow men to transgress women’s boundaries at will, simply by saying “I identify as a woman”, leads to cognitive dissonance that those trying to square the circle tend to externalise with angry outbursts directed at anyone pointing out this very obvious risk.

Justin is at least ten years older than me, far too old to be going along with this crap. When I continued to push back on his and his friends’ ill-defined but rudely-expressed disdain for me, he did exactly what I thought he might, which was to go through my Facebook posts and extend his criticism of me to ‘spreading Russian propaganda’. You just knew it was coming! Wrongthink in one area is always evidence of wrongthink in all areas, to those who let others do their thinking for them. I had had quite enough of him and his coterie of morons by then, so I replied with the infamous picture of the Azov Battalion posing in front of NATO and Nazi flags, and told him that this was who he was standing with, and that as such he was a pathetic coward, and a racist, misogynist narcissist to boot. Felt pretty good, I must admit.

The funniest part is that his ‘playing at Pride’ boast presumably just means he will be performing on one of the many small stages dotted around the city that always host gigs during the summer, but this week will have rainbow flags on them. If he had just said he was going to perform on one of these stages that would have been fine and I would have ignored it like usual, but it had to be presented confrontationally as a brave act of defiance, as if by performing this week he was bravely standing up for something. Well here’s what you’re bravely standing up for, Justin: men’s rights, unnecessary medicalisation (including of children) and ubiquitous cynical corporate branding. Good for you, you dick.