Liriena wrote:Y'all could at least do some basic PR stuff and have a pride thread...
You have a fair point with the rest of the post, but I'm gonna step in on this specific point with a SO MUCH NO. The conflation of caring about LGBT issues and subscribing to or supporting the "Pride" movement grinds my gears.
Pride isn't just about supporting the right of LGBT people to exist relatively unharassed. Pride is a vision of what the LGBT community, what it should desire to be, and what kind of world it wants to live in. It's both aesthetic and ideology. The aesthetic is often mired in 1980s-style caricatured stereotypes. Those involved believe that playing up to essentialised ideas of gayness and selectively re-appropriating them provides a common basis for community identity, diminishes discrimination by eroding shock value and profoundly asserting that they will not be forced into the closet or made to conform to wider social norms. While economically agnostic, the movement and its leadership maintains active affiliations with movements of other "oppressed groups", including feminism, and a general orientation towards seeing the progress of the community as tied up with social justice activism, and other related activisms such as student politics, and the wider "antifascist" movement.
Many LGBT people, myself included, HATE pride. Fundamentally, I dislike the focus on its attempt to make itself the definition "what we are" and reduce the "truth" of our identities to stereotypes and caricatures that we do not recognise as reflections of ourselves in the slightest. This is profoundly alienating and it feels like a form of identity theft. The aesthetic is - to many of us - obnoxious, and I cringe deep into my sofa everytime these people get on TV and loudly declare themselves as the representatives of LGBT people, this assumption going thoroughly unchallenged by the news reports. Given the wider political affiliations of Pride and its generally left-liberal leaning and positive orientation towards feminism, it's also fully understandable that even the members of the MRA community that are LGBT don't want much to do with it.