Skipping Towards Gomorrah (33 page)

One might expect that gay people, of all people, would be able to recognize the legitimacy of a good time for the sake of a good time. After all, coming out of the closet is about the pursuit of the most basic human happiness: sexual fulfillment. We come out to get laid and, with luck, find love. (A gay person can get laid without ever coming out of the closet, of course. Catholic priests have been doing it for centuries. But such closeted sex is miserable, furtive, paranoia-inducing, and emotionally unsatisfying.) Coming out is about pursuing happiness even at the risk of losing the love of your biological family and never getting to experience the joy of no-fault divorce proceedings. So why can't gay parades be a celebration of pleasure? And fun? And the pursuit of happiness? And honest?

Perhaps it's time for gay parades to come out of the closet. Gay people should admit that the pride parade is about pleasure, period. There's even a model for this new, honest, gays-just-want-to-have-fun parade. What is Mardi Gras in New Orleans but a huge, outrageous heterosexual pride parade? No one pretends Mardi Gras is anything but a party; Mardi Gras is streets packed with straight people in outrageous costumes abusing drugs and alcohol and shoving their sexuality in all of our faces. If gays and lesbians could stop tarting up a good time in the drag of good intentions, our annual parade wouldn't be an occasion for heterosexuals to grump at us about dykes on bikes, men in drag, and boys on leashes. If we dropped pride and politics from it and let the parade be a parade, people like Bill O'Reilly wouldn't be able to bitch about it. Right now, gay people tell Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the straights that the parade is about political liberation and gay youth and gay marriage and civil rights and equality under the law. But when O'Reilly turns on the TV, all he sees are men walking in lime-green thongs, men in drag, and dykes on bikes. Of course O'Reilly's offended—he's been lied to. Remember, it's not the sex that bothers O'Reilly, it's the lying about the sex.

So let's stop lying about it. Gay pride parades aren't about liberation anymore. We're liberated already. I know, I know—we haven't achieved full equality yet, but that's not stopping us from living our lives openly, honestly, and pursuing happiness like maniacs. Since being openly gay is about striving to live a happy, fulfilled, sexually complete life (with some integrity), fun and pleasure are a natural part of the parade. So let's be honest. Gay people should stop telling reporters and TV newscasters that the parade is about gay youth or gay marriage or gay rights or a protesting gay equality and then show up at the parade in lime-green thongs, take ecstasy, dance, make out, hook up, and take some more ecstasy. So long as we do that, the religious right will be there with their video cameras, ready to expose our hypocrisy. “They said it was a parade about gay rights and look at this video!
These men are dancing with their shirts off!
”

When you suggest this to most gay people—drop the politics from the parade, drop “pride,” drop “gay is good”—they insist that the parade can't change. After all, what about the gay kids? What about the newly out? What about gays and lesbians struggling with shame? Those people still need messages of pride, we're told. (Never mind that very few closeted kids and newly out folks actually attend pride parades.) But kids and the newly out would be just as well served, if not better served, by a parade stripped of both pride and politics. What most newly out gay people take away from their first pride parade—the thing that helps alleviate their shame—isn't anything they hear during the rallies or any of the flyers they're handed. What's important, what moves them, and what matters most, young gay people say, is not what they were told about being gay but what they
saw
: Gay people, all different kinds, all of them out and happy to be gay and having fun. That's the most transformative part of a pride parade for the young and the newly out, and that part would grow stronger in an honest gay parade, one that dropped the inch-deep claims about political liberation. Again, everything that gay pride parades supposedly accomplish now for young gay people could be accomplished by a parade that didn't have an easily exposed lie at its core.

For as long as we attempt to pass our Mardi Gras off as social work, the homophobes with their video cameras will go on exposing the gulf between our goody-goody rationalizations and what actually goes on at pride parades. So let's stop making excuses, let's drop the rationalizations. The gay parade is a good time, and that's enough. We shouldn't have to make excuses for our good time any more than straight people should have to make excuses for Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras is Mardi Gras. It's booze and drugs and sex and costumes, it's packs of young men shouting “Show us your tits!” at young women, and it's packs of young women shouting “Show us your dick!” at young men. It's a good time, period.

There are straight people who don't enjoy Mardi Gras. It's hard to imagine our current First Lady, for instance, showing her tits to her husband, much less a crowd of men throwing plastic beads. No one claims that Mardi Gras represents the political aspirations of all straight Americans, and no one who made such an absurd claim would be taken seriously. But straight Americans are told by gay Americans that the gay pride parade represents the political aspirations of all gay people everywhere, and straight people, in their ignorance, take the claim seriously. So long as there's a disconnect between what we're telling them the pride parade is about and what the pride parade is actually about, people like Bill O'Reilly are going to be offended.

 

“B
ut the liberty to pursue happiness means that each of us pursues whatever it is he may desire,” Robert Bork grouses in
Slouching Towards Gomorrah.
Note the
but
at the beginning of that sentence. The liberty to pursue happiness and the things that we desire is not, in Bork's opinion, a good thing. It requires a
but,
it's problematic. “We are to move away from restraints in pursuit of we know not what,” writes Bork. “Such a person leads a precarious existence.”

Kevin and Jake pursue happiness with an athleticism that I admire but couldn't keep up with. But there's nothing precarious about Kevin and Jake's existence. They've moved away from restraint in pursuit of they know precisely what: sex, love, pleasure. Kevin and Jake know what they want, they know what makes them happy, and they go for it. They certainly were ethical sinners: they shared with their friends, they were courteous to strangers, and they offered me, a stranger with a notebook, their hospitality. In no way were they reckless about indulging themselves. Knowing that drugs were on the day's agenda, Kevin and Jake loaded up on orange juice in the morning; when they got home late Sunday night, they downed protein shakes, took vitamins, and rested up. Recreational drugs are hard on the system, it's true, just as bacon and bourbon and bungee jumping are. If something that's hard on the system makes you happy, well, then you have to take special care of your system before and after you indulge. But from the outside looking in, Bork can't see the care or the restraint in Kevin's and Jake's use and abuse of drugs, sex, and each other. He only sees two self-indulgent men in hot pursuit of things that wouldn't make Bork himself happy.

“There is no reason whatever why a community should not decide that there are moral and aesthetic pollutions it wishes to prohibit,” writes Bork, who would doubtless prohibit Los Angeles's gay pride parade, with its thongs and overt sexual themes. Indeed, Bork supports the enforcement of antigay sodomy laws. (These laws were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1986 but, Bork complains, by an insufficiently wide margin!) Bork is all about the political indulgence of the puritanical impulse: Your pleasures aren't my pleasures, therefore your pleasures are “moral pollutions.” I don't approve of the places your pursuit of happiness takes you, so there ought to be a law that prevents you from going there. . . .

Bork is free to disapprove and judge and condemn and write and go on TV and rant and rave. Anyone who thinks pride parades and green thongs and ecstasy are awful is free to talk gay men out of them. Unlike some lefties, I'm not bothered by persuasion. If anti-choice activists want to spend their money on “Choose Life” billboards, if that's how they wanna pursue happiness, well, more power to 'em. And if anti-gay activists want to talk gay people out of being gay, well, they're free to take out ads in newspapers encouraging gay people to go straight. Not that the ads they do take out are aimed at gay people. Politically motivated Jesus-made-me-straight ads are an attempt to convince straight people that the issue of gay rights would go away if gay people just weren't so stubborn.

(Still it's odd that so many Christians can't seem to grasp the Golden Rule—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. . . .”—especially when it comes to sex. For example, I'm relatively certain that William Bennett doesn't want me dictating the content of his sex life. There are activities I enjoy that I doubt very much Bennett would enjoy. And guess what? I'm happy to let William Bennett pursue his sexual pleasures in peace and quiet. Why can't William Bennett do the same unto me? What about the right to be left alone? It's never occurred to me burst into the bedroom of a conservative Christian couple engaged in loving, missionary-position, procreative sexual intercourse and try and talk them into sodomizing each other. [“No, no, no. Fuck her in the
ass
!”] I would never do that unto someone. So how come so many fundamentalist Christians out there are trying to talk me out of my boyfriend's ass and into procreative, missionary-position sex with some miserable ex-lesbian? Why are they doing that unto me?)

Bork and his fellow scolds shouldn't attempt to prohibit my pleasures—or Kevin's or Jake's or Tim's or yours, dear reader, or each other's. First, because it isn't right and, second, because prohibiting pleasures simply isn't doable. Take me to the driest county in the most conservative state, and in two hours this determined hedonist will find you all the drugs, whores, and booze you'll need to pass an eventful weekend. But the biggest problem in prohibiting moral and aesthetic pollutions is, of course, figuring out who gets to decide what qualifies. One man's moral and aesthetic pollution may be central to another man's pursuit of happiness. And when and where that happens, well, the delicate sensibilities of the majority have to yield to the desires of the individual. For while I would never wear a lime-green thong in public myself, I will defend to the death Thong Man's right to do so.

 

I
got separated from Kevin and Jake and Tim in the crowd. There was only so long I could stand around watching people dance, even Tim. So still rolling on ecstasy, I wandered out of the festival grounds and onto Santa Monica Boulevard. It was ninety degrees in the sun, and since I couldn't just stand around on street corners grinning like a lunatic, I decided to walk the six miles back to Kevin and Jake's house.

The premise of this book obligates me to celebrate the sin of pride, and the people I met while committing it. I failed in this effort, I suppose, since I don't have anything all that nice to say about the rhetoric gay people kick around every year at the end of June. While I can't stand mush-brained pride rhetoric, rainbow merchandise, and while I abhor the harm this rhetoric does to gay people and the confusion it sows among straights, what I can celebrate is the simple having of fun. The parade is, as Kevin and Jake insist, a good time. All the harm throwing the word
pride
does the gay community could be eliminated if we would drop the term, just as the African Americans dropped “black power,” and feminists dropped “hear me roar.” If you are a powerful black person, you don't have to defensively insist you have power; all you have to do is exercise it. Same goes for gay pride. If you're gay and you're not ashamed of it, you don't need pride. If you're gay and you are ashamed, you're a liar when you claim to be proud.

On the long walk back to Kevin and Jake's house, I passed the Tom Kat Theater, L.A.'s gay porn palace.

I paid my ten dollars and slipped into the Tom Kat Theater. Not wanting to risk sitting down on any recently deposited DNA samples, I stood at the back. Porn has never been my thing (there are places the sun isn't
supposed
to shine), nor is anonymous sex with strange men in dark theaters. (I have a hard time sharing a can of Coke with my boyfriend much less kissing someone whose mouth has been god-knows-where). But while the Tom Kat's brand of happiness wasn't one I would personally pursue, I was nevertheless thrilled that it was open and available to sinners who did find this brand of happiness—however icky, depressing, and desperate it might seem to me—in the theater's seats, bathrooms, and aisles.

Still rolling on ecstasy, I smiled at the aesthetic pollution on the screen and at the moral pollution creeping around the theater. The bottoms of my shoes were stuck to the floor as I watched one gay-for-pay straight porn star fuck another gay-for-pay straight porn star in the ass. The porn film I was watching? It was a new gay porn flick, the first installment in a series.
The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride.