Pride Today

June 2002

One of the earliest gay pride slogans was “Gay is Good.” This catch phrase was meant as an antidote to ubiquitous, vitriolic anti-gay sentiment.

Before Stonewall and the sexual revolution, homosexuality was almost uniformly denounced as unspeakably bad: doctors labeled it a sickness, the law branded it a crime, and clerics pronounced it a sin. Few individuals were brave enough to announce their own homosexual feelings or experiences. Even to suggest that perhaps homosexuality could be thought of differently, as something other than monstrous perversion, was to risk being ostracized and deemed suspect. There was one way­ and one way only­ of presenting homosexuality in public discourse: as sick, criminal, and sinful. To be thought gay, or gay sympathetic, was to risk ones job, family, housing, liberty, and even life.

“Gay is Good” was a succinct way of challenging all those lies. Gay liberation pioneers knew from their own experience that what society condemned as evil was, in truth, a potential source of celebration, pleasure, and social bonding. They understood that the pathology was in the irrational, hysterical response to homosexuality, not in homosexuality itself. What everyone else called bad, they proclaimed as good. They realized that what needed changing was not gay people, but rather attitudes about gay people.

Today, “Gay is Good” seems almost simplistically quaint. Though nasty anti-gay sentiment remains a potent force, there has been a radical shift in societal attitudes. No longer is it seen as imperative that everyone behave heterosexually. Homosexuality is recognized as part of human diversity. Instead of being twisted into caricatures of depraved “fags” and “dykes,” gay people’s lives and actions now have a better chance of being evaluated by the same standards we use to judge other human interactions.

While we can rejoice in the recent progress made towards more humane attitudes about some homosexuality, fearful hysteria has actually intensified around other aspects of gay sexual expression.

A whopping double standard exists whereby teen heterosexuality is winked at, but similar homosexual expression is blasted as worse than murder. Adolescent boys discovered with an older female partner­ like Jennifer O’Neill in the movie Summer of ’42 or the mythic prostitute-as-teacher­ are seen as worldly. Their sexual experiences, good and bad, are seen as contributing to their maturation. But adolescents discovered with an older male partner are seen as pitiable victims of the most heinous crime imaginable. So great is their supposed psychic damage that no amount of counseling (or money) can prevent them, we are told, from being scarred for life.

Could the gender of the lips kissing and sucking an adolescent male really make all that much difference? Of course not.

Housewives and hookers are tolerated as sex objects for adolescent males, while Scout masters and priests are decidedly not. At the root of this discrimination is anti-gay sentiment; “tainting” boys with homosexuality is seen as far worse a crime than beating or even killing them.

Today, anyone who even suggests that adolescent sexual expression with an older man is not inherently cataclysmically harmful faces enormous risks. Imagine a Catholic man who asserted that his sexual experience with his priest years ago was both fun and beneficial to his later development. His story would be dismissed: he would be seen as a tragic victim, warped by his “abuse”; if a teacher, he would be fired; if a father, his children could be taken away. Like many pre-Stonewall homosexuals, fear would keep him silent.

This June, we can make pride events mean more than marketing opportunities for rainbow hoopla. Like early gay liberation pioneers, we too are surrounded­ on every front-page, in every TV newscast­ by lies about the wickedness of homosexuality. Let us trust our own lives and experiences. Let us find the courage to proclaim to a crazed and fearful world that indeed, no matter ones age, gay is good.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=42D5D3D3-6A82-4B20-B5544DBC652CCAB8>