Ever-Growing Distance in Queer Communities

There’s uproar in my local queer community.

I’m sure that’s pretty normal wherever you go — at least within North America and parts of the world where it is relatively safe to be an LGBT2SQ+ person.

Pride starts at the end of this month and stretches into early June. And people are livid. Why? Honestly, I feel like I don’t get it. The parade route is different than last year.

Last year was a major anniversary for the local pride parade, so city administration allowed the parade to go down the busiest street in the city and offered a greatly reduced price for doing so. Now that it’s not a major anniversary year, the pride committee would have to pay full price for accessing that street, which is beyond the budget of the committee.

So… just do the route of the year before… right? Can’t do that either. For the few years before last year’s anniversary route, the parade went in a circuit through downtown, ending where it started. But with the parade being so long, the front of the parade circled through the whole route before the end of it left the starting point, causing a logjam. With the parade growing every year, this is no longer a feasible route.

The pride committee worked with the city to come up with a new route. It goes through the middle of downtown while largely avoiding the busy streets that would be too expensive to block off. It’s not the greatest route, but it was the compromise that the pride committee and city administration came to.

Of course, so many people hate it for so many different reasons. The disability community is up in arms because the route isn’t the best for accessibility. (I find that strange, as one of the comments in particular is that the tall buildings do something to sound quality, making it hard for hard of hearing folks to hear. I’m half deaf and I do fine.) The younger folks feel this isn’t visible enough and are apparently planning an “alternative pride parade” that will walk down the super-busy-and-far-too-expensive downtown street of last year’s route. How they’ll do that without being arrested, I don’t know.

All I know is that almost everyone is screaming at almost everyone else.

The only people who aren’t completely and totally enraged are either those who have served on the pride committee at some point or those who have been a part of the local pride parade since year one. Those on the committee know how hard it is to plan this parade and they know that this new route is the best that all parties could agree to. Those who remember or were part of the first parade are just happy that they can still march without “anonymity masks” (paper bags to be worn over a marcher’s head, which were handed out for free at the first parade).

There’s a chasm between all of these groups. They’re so far apart from each other that they can’t even contemplate the others’ points of view. No one seems to want to listen to anyone else — they just want to scream, protest, and hurl swears on Facebook.

But what I find particularly interesting is that this is a very privileged point of view and those who are doing all the screaming don’t seem to understand that simply being able to have a parade without a worry of violence is a feat in itself. You don’t even have to go to one of those dangerous countries to find a place where simply having a parade is an incredible thing in itself.

In the last three years, small communities and rural areas throughout my province have had their inaugural pride parades. One of our most homophobic small towns, one that’s made the national news a few times for that very fact, had their first pride two years ago.

I doubt they were fighting over the route. And if their route changes this year, I doubt anyone from that community will raise their voices over it. In that town, the simple act of marching and being proud of who you are is groundbreaking.

And in these small communities or other parts of the world where being LGBT2SQ+ is dangerous and even something that brings a risk of death, there is less public uproar among their local queer communities.

In that small town, if the parade route would change this year, there may be a few people who are upset about it — but will they stage large public protests and scream about it on Facebook and hurl swears at parade organizers? Probably not. For in that town, homophobic residents are looking for anything and everything to throw right back at the community they hate — and the community knows this.

I’m somewhat involved in my local queer community and I hear now and then from homophobic folks that love to point out how we as a queer community can’t get along. They love to point out our flaws. They love to point out our disharmony. We’re in a privileged city and we’re a privileged community — and I don’t think a lot of these screaming angry mob folks fully realize it — and they certainly don’t realize how fragile and tenuous that privilege is.

In that small town, only an hour’s distance from here, that same public discord among their queer community could mean the death of their pride celebration. And that could then in turn make that community very unwelcoming and very unsafe for queer folks, particularly for young queer kids.

In homophobic countries, places where it’s a crime to be gay, any public discord like this would be used as a weapon against the community. This type of public discord could lead to the deaths of LGBTQ+ folks.

Am I pleading for people to just be happy and get along?

No.

For the new route for the parade in my city, there may, in fact, be accessibility issues. There may, in fact, be a better route that the committee and the city could have agreed to. There may, in fact, have been a way to fundraise to allow the parade to go down that main thoroughfare for that very high cost.

But this public protesting, groups screaming at other groups, swears being hurled at pride committee volunteers on Facebook, accusation after accusation — these chasms between the groups in our collective community — they do nothing but harm us as a community. And when you harm us as a community, it becomes less safe to self-identify as LGBT2SQ+.

It’s still not safe — even in this major city in Canada — to be fully out as LGBT2SQ+. I choose who I want to be out to and where I want to be out — I don’t live my whole life as out and gay. I don’t mean do I decide to deck myself out in rainbows and act campy wherever I go. I mean choosing when I go out with my husband to interact with him like he’s my husband or like he’s just my friend. I mean when I go to a restaurant with my husband, do I hold his hand or not? I mean when he picks me up and I jump in his car, do I give him a quick kiss like a heterosexual couple would or do I just say “hey”?

I’m comfortable in my sexuality and I’m not ashamed of it — and still I have to make these choices. What about someone who isn’t comfortable or isn’t safe or free to even contemplate these choices? What good does such public and anger-filled discourse do?

Instead fo building bridges within our community and between our groups, we’re only widening the chasms. The distance between us grows with every passing year. And it only hurts us in the end.




Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is Autumn Fire. He is publisher at and co-founder of Deep Desires Press, member of the Indie Erotica Collective, and hosts two podcasts, Deep Desires Podcast and Sex For Money. He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats. To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.

Pride and Joy

by Annabeth Leong

I first encountered her at the tobacco shop and wine bar on the downtown strip. I was technically too young to be in there, but no one questioned me. I smoked Gauloises in an effort to seem sophisticated, but I've always contained too much innocence to hide things like the way she made me feel. She was olive-skinned and tall, strong-jawed and gorgeous. All that faded, though, when the song came.

I was a little girl when Stevie Ray Vaughan first sang that song, so I didn't learn it from him. I learned it from this woman, and the sound of its opening bars is inextricably associated with the thrilling shock of hearing her belt out these words about a female lover. I've heard plenty of women sing songs that way now, taking the words written by a man and not changing them to make them "right," but at the time the audacity seemed incredible. Hearing her declare herself "her little loverboy" opened my eyes to something I'd never been able to describe.

I was obsessed and foolish. The town was small, and I could hear and recognize her voice from a block away. I could walk up and down the downtown strip and listen for it. I could hang out after a show and hope she'd say that I could ride with her to the all-night diner. I could wish for a kiss that never came, wonder if the truth that seemed to live inside her singing voice also lived within her heart. Was this all a ploy, or was there something being confessed here?

***

"You could be friends with women, but you sleep with them, too." The therapist's voice was faintly accusing, and my mind could fill out the rest just fine on its own. I was a slut who slept with too many men, but I was worse than that because I slept with women, too. Not only that, the fact that I wanted to sleep with women was ruining my friendships, making me untrustworthy.

This wasn't only the therapist's idea. I'll never forget the school trip where the girls protested about having to share a room with me. I remember the girls who wouldn't come over to my house and the places I wasn't invited. And before that, I remember other untrustworthy women—the aunt who was only whispered about, her name never mentioned except in tones of disgust, because she'd left my uncle to be with women; the friend of my mother's who had destroyed their connection by declaring her love.

And later, my constant feeling of being a spy. "What's there to worry about?" someone would say as she whipped off her shirt. "It's just us girls."

All that is shame, not pride. All that is grief, not joy.

They were mixed up together for so long. I remember the first time I woke up with a girl, my heart pounding in fierce celebration of everything we'd discovered the night before. We drove around and did ordinary things, but the world was no longer ordinary. I was in her car! She was breathing next to me! But then she almost hit the car in front of us, and it felt like a divine warning that we'd better not get too cocky.

After she left, I wrote in my diary, "I had real sex last night," and then I ripped out the page, tore it to bits, and burned it because I was afraid of my mother discovering it in the trash. It makes me sad to think of that. I wish I had the record of that morning. I remember the painstaking care I took trying to describe my fear and excitement.

***

I feel unqualified to take this twist on this topic. Apart from the gay sex, I've lived most of my life as straight. That's the punchline to a joke somewhere, right?

I once made a girl fall in love with me by buying her a bottle of her favorite scent, which was hard to find before the internet. She was on vacation, and I went to store after store looking for it. When she got back, I wrote her a note to go with the bottle, in which I said, "I wanted to tell the cashier, 'I'm buying this for my GIRLFRIEND.'" She melted and told me that was exactly the right thing to say. But a week later, I had freaked out and locked myself away with a boy.

I could be bold, but I was too cowardly for pride. I was sure that all my desires were wrong—not just the ones for women, but all the things I thought about while I got myself off.

If there's anything that does qualify me to write this way, it's this: I understand why pride is necessary. I have torn myself and others up with shame. I have let people use the word "they" around me, both because I was afraid I didn't belong and because I was afraid I did.

***

"She's shaking." People love to point it out, I think because it's cute to them. But yeah, I'm shaking. I'm on my knees in front of a woman at a BDSM convention.

"I'm shaking because I want this so much," I tell her. I feel like her little loverboy.

What nobody knows is that when I sit back down after it's over, I keep shaking for the next hour. The person next to me tells me, "That was sweet," and all I can do is nod. I go home and lie in bed and shake. For days, I shake whenever I think about it. I'm shaking right now.

***

I'm still not sure what to call myself. The first time I wrote about this subject at The Grip, someone on Twitter described my writing as queer, and I jumped all over that as if, like Adam, they could name me. That felt like permission, and I desperately needed permission.

To me, having a name does matter. If something is a pride and joy, it's got a name. The things I'm afraid to name are things bound up with shame.

And there is something about wearing a thing in public, which I still struggle to do. It was truly dangerous where I used to live. The girls I slept with back then—when we went out together, we pretended to be friends. Then later, I just pretended to be friends.

There was a woman I loved who was my pride and joy. Whenever people realized we'd showed up somewhere together, I wanted to grin and brag. Being in her car, her house, having plans with her—my heart grew larger from every little thing. But I didn't want to touch her. Not like that. I would tell you if you asked. I would cry and swear to it. It was only after I lost all claim to her that I had to admit what I wished the claim had been.

It is only recently that I have been wearing this out in public, making it clear about myself in various ways, spoken and gestured. I volunteered to run an LGBTQ meetup for an event a participate in. I may not be able to say which of those letters is mine, but I'm damn sure one of them is. I feel sheepish about all this, embarrassed to admit how the once-ordinary world is changing around me, afraid that if I confess to the perfect peace in my heart it might come out the wrong way.

It's not that I don't care about specific people, because I do, but it's also not as simple as being struck down by love. I wanted to walk down the street without hiding and being afraid. Pride and joy, even if I'm shaking again.