June 30 2024 Frighten the Horses: San Francisco’s Pride Parade
You who are fearless, unconquered, and free, who have seized ownership of your identities and made of your lives enactments of beauty and of defiance; know that you shall never stand alone, while we who love liberty yet remain. …
You who are fearless, unconquered, and free, who have seized ownership of your identities and made of your lives enactments of beauty and of defiance; know that you shall never stand alone, while we who love liberty yet remain.
You are not invisible. And to all those who transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden, who in the performance of themselves challenge and defy the authorization of identities including those of sex and gender, and by their representation champion the silenced and the erased as heroic figures of autonomy and liberation, I salute you.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
Gender and sexual personae are a performance, both a struggle for ownership of identity between self and other and an event occurring in the free space of play between these bounded realms.
This day the glorious transgression and performance of unauthorized identities as liberation struggle seizes the streets of San Francisco in the Pride Parade, a triumphal march of the Unconquered. What does it mean for us all as guerilla theatre, questioning of authority, parrhesia and truth telling, seizure of power and autonomy, the victory of solidarity over division and the celebration of our uniqueness over fear, and a public throwing open of the gates of our possibilities of becoming human?
As I have written of love as a force of liberation struggle; I say again; human sexual orientation is not a spectrum with endpoint limits, but a Moebius Loop of infinite possibilities, and we are born and exist by nature everywhere along it at once. All else is limitation and control imposed artificially as dominion, captivity, and falsification by authorized identities, or a seizure of power and self-ownership in revolutionary struggle against such narratives, hierarchies, and divisions.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
As I have written of Stonewall as a case of Resistance; To paraphrase Max Stirner; Freedom must be seized; it cannot be granted by authority. Our self-ownership of identity is a form of autonomy and freedom, and this also must be seized. This is the primary act of human being, this self-creation, because it liberates us from authorized identities, the tyranny of other people's ideas of virtue, and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty. We must perform and celebrate our uniqueness as beauty and goodness which we ourselves create and own, as well as that of others in diversity and inclusion of our infinite possibilities of becoming human.
Those who defy authority beneath the Rainbow Flag of Pride perform a vital service not merely for themselves and for their own community, but for us all. On this and every day, let us question and challenge the limits of our normality as a journey of discovery of our true selves and the unknown topologies of human being, meaning, and value, as a celebration of ourselves and one another as self-created and autonomous individuals, and as an art of guerilla theatre.
Ask no permission in the performance of identity, but seek the exaltation of your uniqueness as a path of beauty and of freedom.
The performance of oneself is an art of discovery, vision, reimagination, and transformation, of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and all true art defiles and exalts.
Always frighten the horses.
There is a cure for the injustice of our normality, the tyranny of theocratic constructions of virtue as an instrument of subjugation and otherness, and the violence of our authorized identities; wage love and not hate, diversity and inclusion and not demonization and criminalization, in the performance of our identities as autonomous individuals and transform society by our example and the resilience of our community.
This is what I mean by inclusion of the phrase "the frightening of the horses" in my social media profile, in which I paraphrase the famous quote by the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, muse of George Bernard Shaw; "I really don't mind what people do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses." There are times wherein the boundaries of the Forbidden must be transgressed in order to seize the power which it holds over us, and as our system of justice is designed laws must be broken in order to test them as a growing child tests limits in self-construal. When this occurs in public spaces it becomes revolutionary and transformational, a form of guerrilla theatre.
When you begin to question the boundary and interface between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people's ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery. May the new truths you forge bring you joy.
As written in The Guardian, in an article entitled Pride across the US: celebration and defiance in the face of threats: LGBTQ+ people and their allies celebrated throughout the nation, even as the number of hate incidents has increased; "Celebrations mingled with displays of resistance on Sunday as LGBTQ+ Pride parades filled streets in some of the the US's largest cities in annual events that have become part party, part protest.
In New York, thousands marched down Manhattan's Fifth Avenue to Greenwich Village, cheering and waving rainbow flags to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall uprising, when a police raid on a gay bar triggered days of protests and launched a movement for LGBTQ+ rights.
While some people whooped it up in celebration, many were mindful of the growing conservative countermovement to limit rights, including by banning gender-affirming care for transgender children.
"I'm not trying not to be very heavily political, but when it does target my community, I get very, very annoyed and very hurt," said Ve Cinder, a 22-year-old transgender woman who traveled from Pennsylvania to take part in the country's largest Pride event.
"I'm just, like, scared for my future and for my trans siblings. I'm frightened of how this country has looked at human rights, basic human rights," she said. "It's crazy."
Parades in New York, Chicago and San Francisco are among the events that roughly 400 Pride organizations across the US are holding this year, with many focused specifically on the rights of transgender people.
In San Francisco, Pride events began on Friday with a trans march through Dolores Park to the Tenderloin.
Just before Saturday's parade down Market Street, the Alice B Toklas LGBTQ+ Democratic Club held its 26th annual Pride breakfast featuring more than 600 community leaders and elected officials, including Montana representative Zooey Zephyr. The transgender lawmaker in April was barred from speaking on the chamber floor for the rest of the session by Republican politicians after she spoke against a ban on gender-affirming medical care for trans children.
The 53rd annual parade was led by the group Dykes on Bikes, which has kicked off the celebration in a chorus of revving engines and cheering since 1976.
"It's important for us to be out and queer and visible and show courage," said Kate Brown, president of the Dykes on Bikes board, to the San Francisco Chronicle. "That's what we do."
Representative Adam Schiff rode with House speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi in the parade, which is in its 53rd year and is one of the largest free celebrations in the country.
"I'm thrilled to be here when LGBTQ rights are under assault across the country," Schiff told the Chronicle.
In Chicago, 16-year-old Maisy McDonough painted rainbow colors over her eyes and on her face for her first Pride parade.
She told the Chicago Tribune she's excited to "be united" after a tough year for the community.
"We really need the love of this parade," she said.
Entertainers and activists, drag performers and transgender advocates are among the parade grand marshals embracing a unity message as new laws targeting the LGBTQ+ community take effect in several US states.
"The platform will be elevated, and we'll see communities across the country show their unity and solidarity through these events," said Ron deHarte, co-president for the US Association of Prides.
Annual observations have spread to other cities and grown to welcome bisexual, transgender and queer people, as well as other groups.
About a decade ago, when her 13-year-old child first wanted to be called a boy, Roz Gould Keith sought help. She found little to assist her family in navigating the transition. They attended a Pride parade in the Detroit area, but saw little transgender representation.
This year, she is heartened by the increased visibility of transgender people at marches and celebrations across the country this month.
"Ten years ago, when my son asked to go to Motor City Pride, there was nothing for the trans community," said Keith, founder and executive director of Stand With Trans, a group formed to support and empower young transgender people and their families.
This year, she said, the event was "jam-packed" with transgender people.
One of the grand marshals of New York City's parade is non-binary activist AC Dumlao, chief of staff for Athlete Ally, a group that advocates on behalf of LGBTQ+ athletes.
"Uplifting the trans community has always been at the core of our events and programming," said Dan Dimant, a spokesperson for NYC Pride.
Many of this year's parades called for LGBTQ+ communities to unite against dozens, if not hundreds, of legislative bills now under consideration in statehouses across the country.
Lawmakers in 20 states have moved to ban gender-affirming care for children, and at least seven more are considering doing the same, adding increased urgency for the transgender community, its advocates say.
"We are under threat," Pride event organizers in New York, San Francisco and San Diego said in a statement joined by about 50 other Pride organizations nationwide. "The diverse dangers we are facing as an LGBTQ community and Pride organizers, while differing in nature and intensity, share a common trait: they seek to undermine our love, our identity, our freedom, our safety, and our lives."
Some parades, including the event in Chicago, planned to have beefed-up security amid the upheaval.
The Anti-Defamation League and Glaad, a national LGBTQ+ organization, found 101 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents in the first three weeks of this month, about twice as many as in the full month of June last year.
Sarah Moore, who analyzes extremism for the two civil rights groups, said many of the June incidents coincide with Pride events."
So I wrote and gathered references in my post of last year, and nothing has made our nation or the world safer for our outcasts; indeed it grows less so, and more terrible with the looming darkness of theocratic tyranny.
I wonder now if I would have even noticed the existence of these marginalized peoples without the enormous hate and Otherness directed at them as theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and often as state terror and tyranny; how did this become a central issue for me, who has no skin in the game?
Here I must recognize the influence of figures who became informing, motivating, and shaping forces for my own self construction as I grew up; Edward Albee, William S. Burroughs, Susan Sontag, and Jean Genet.
Albee and Burroughs were friends of my father; he directed some of Albee's plays and from the age of four I sat in the theatre with them listening to their conversations, while Uncle Bill was among his court of arts luminaries and an occasional guest at our home between my fifth and seventh grade years. I was unaware of the queer identity of either Albee or Burroughs until far later when a teenager in high school, nor would I have understood its implications; from Albee I was influenced toward Surrealism, and Burroughs taught me the bizarre and unique system of magic he and my father invented and practiced, though his retellings of our family history as bent versions of Grimm's fairytales were wonderful and strange.
Genet and Sontag were chance encounters of my university years, Susan at an art museum shortly after her final book was published, Jean at breakfast in Beirut during the Siege. Both were friendships of conversations; she my guide and backstage pass to the world of art and other glitterati of the intelligentsia who taught me how to see, he a comrade in liberation struggle who set me on my life's path as a revolutionary and swore me to the Oath of the Resistance he had created in Paris 1940 for such friends as he could gather. Interrogations of sex and gender were not among the subjects we discussed, neither Susan nor Jean and I, at least not regarding ourselves personally.
Yet when I later began to problematize questions of sex and gender and the rights of sexual outlaws in terms of liberation struggle against authority and systems of oppression, as a group who were extremely visible in the San Francisco where as a young fellow I went to university, they did not seem alien or threatening to me as Outsiders because I had grown up in the shadows of kind and wise family and personal friends which included Albee, Burroughs, Sontag, and Genet.
As written by the Roman playwright Terrence in Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor) Act I, scene 1; "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto," or "I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me."
Representation matters; among its true powers is to make us see each other, and to make the set of possibilities of becoming human less narrow, and more free.
So for the value of performance of unauthorized identities as Resistance and liberation under imposed conditions of struggle which include Othering, marginalization, silence and erasure, rewritten histories, and falsification by those who would enslave us.
Beyond the theatre of identity, how can we bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world?
"I draw from the Absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion"; so wrote Alfred Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, and as I reflect on the meaning of Pride Parades as acts of resistance and seizures of power against systems of oppression and authorized identities of sex and gender, I can think of no finer summation of the will to become human as a praxis of liberty, self creation, and autonomy.
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