Author: / Fiona Deane-Grundman /

I won’t beat around the bush — as a queer identifying woman in 2019, I felt immense relief when June 30th turned into July 1st. Pride Month was officially over.

My first experience with the phenomenon was the first time I went to San Francisco Pride in 2016. I was in the weird half-closet space I’m sure most queer people are familiar with — I didn’t resonate with any of the indicators “gay”, “lesbian”, “pansexual”, or “queer” — but I definitely wasn’t straight.

I had had the most intense romantic feelings for a girl in my after school theater program, and had even “dated” another girl for about two months (well, dated her as much as you can when you are both in tenth grade and live 20 minutes away from each other). I wasn’t straight, I wasn’t gay, and most of all, I wasn’t “proud.” 

Although it may not seem it, in 2015 — when I first begin to accept my non-straight identity — it was a very different social landscape than it is today.

Most straight people, at least from my semi-rural high school, didn’t go to the Pride parade. There were two, maybe three out gay people at my school, and even fewer lesbians. Our production of Romeo and Juliet, with both title roles played by women, was mired in controversy. Multiple parents disapproved and said it made them “uncomfortable.” It wasn’t uncommon to hear the word “faggot” tossed around as a casual insult, and even less common that someone would speak up about it.

Living and going to school in such an environment made me miserable. I wasn’t a complete social outcast because of my sexuality, but that’s because I made such an effort to conceal and brush over the fact that I wasn’t straight, even when I was relatively “out” (i.e. dating a girl).

Many months into my relationship with a girl who went to school in a far more diverse and accepting community, I had to think of reasons to convince her to not come to my prom. I

had avoided introducing her to my friends at all costs. Maybe this was partially because she was not a good person and it was a vastly unhappy relationship, but it more likely stemmed from my fear that if people knew I was dating a girl, or worse — saw me being intimate with her, it would change their opinion of me. 

I don’t think my sexuality was the only thing that differentiated me from my high school peers — we were different in many other regards, too. From having the financial necessity to actually get a job in high school instead of being gifted a Lexus, to a desire to escape the suburban bubble we grew up in, etc… but I would be lying if I said my identity didn’t play a major role in my feelings of alienation and isolation throughout high school.

For the better part of those four years, I was made to feel — by family, “friends”, the school community, and popular culture — broken, wrong, disgusting, unwanted, and completely alone. I compensated heavily, trying to be “straight” in every other regard besides my actual sexuality. If I had to pinpoint one word to describe my coming-of-age, coming-of-queer experience, the word shame is much more accurate than the word pride. 

For the better part of four years, I was made to feel wrong, disgusting, unwanted, and alone.

This is why, several years later, seeing the same straight people from my school post pictures of themselves at the SF Pride made me so angry. Why I didn’t even want to attend the parade the past few years. Rather, I’d opt for chilling in Dolores Park with my friends, miles away from the festivities at Civic Center. Nonetheless, it’s not easy to escape the “iconic” parade made up almost entirely of corporate floats, straight girls in cheap butterfly wings (bound to be discarded almost immediately), and straight guys who would leer at a real lesbian couple in any other situation. To really complete the experience there are huge lines, crowds of chaotic drunk people, a handful of semi-predatory men, and a police presence to rival a riot. 

While queer people do show up to Pride, their presence is usurped by the hordes of straight people attempting to cash out on a tradition that has historically been about opposing their oppression. To steal from the “Queer Nation Manifesto” — a manifesto passed out by people marching with the ACT UP contingent in the New York Gay Pride Parade, “It is easier to fight when you know who your enemy is. Straight people are your enemy. They are your enemy when they don’t acknowledge your invisibility and continue to live in and contribute to a culture that kills you.”

It’s true that straight people took part in Pride celebrations in the past. They were the cops who were beating and bashing “out” queer people, notably trans women of color, who have always been a target of immense violence but are still some of the most silenced members of the “community.”

One of my most defined memories of my first Pride was not celebrating my burgeoning sexuality with my friends and reveling in how loved, accepted, and equal I was made to feel — as I’m supposed to believe Pride is all about — but watching an actual queer couple be shoved into the door of a crowded Bart train by a group of belligerent straight people.

Straight people are trying to cash out on a tradition which, historically, is about rejecting their oppression.

This year, when a large group of straight high-schoolers came into my train car identically dressed in shorts and rainbow crop tops for the girls and basketball jerseys for the boys, I yelled something along the lines of, “It’s so brave of you to come out and support the community. I love seeing queer people at Pride.” I hope I helped them feel some of the same sense of humiliation and alienation that is integral to the experience of growing up queer when I did and even now, in 2019 (as much help as the occasional Target ad feauturing lesbians provides). 

I don’t think yelling at some asshole kids on the BART makes me an activist. For all I know, some of them might actually have been LGBTQ. I’m not even writing this to help convince straight people to not go to Pride, or queer people to boycott it as an act of “resistance” and “praxis.” I acknowledge that for some queer people, Pride is a positive and necessary experience. However, I want people to acknowledge the strangeness of corporate Pride, which exists as an isolated day of “support” by pandering companies that contribute greatly to a culture that wants to minimize or silence voices of opposition– radical voices, anticapitalist voices, queer voices — every other day of the year. The cognitive dissonance of the event happening in SF and other city centers with a malignant culture of displacement, homelessness, and gentrification, blows my mind. 

Despite my position of relative privilege, as a white, able-bodied, educated woman who has the ability to choose the physical safety and normalcy of a straight relationship (and be satisfied with it), I cannot just shake off the sense of shame inherent to my relationship to my queerness for one day, and no part of me wishes to.

Pride, as it exists today, wishes to make us forget our queerness and assimilate into a society that hasn’t valued us until it realized it could exploit our identities to turn a profit. I am as attached to my shame as straight people are to going on dates in Target, or having bad trips at music festivals, or streaming Ed Sheeran. My shame kept me company at a time when I felt I had almost no one who would accept me as I am, and I refuse to abandon it to assimilate into a culture that is built on values of hatred, fear, division, and self-interest — values that are antithetical to queerness as I have come to know it.
Photos (in order of appearance) by Daniela Guevara, Francesca Iacono, and Disco Duckie.