Years ago, joking with a Black Woman with whom I taught, she noticed that I, a Gay man, was using certain phrases and certain deliveries of a point with the words and inflexion she was familiar with among her Black female friends. When I first met her, this was a few decades ago, her experience with known Gay people speaking comfortably about themselves was something with which she was not familiar, a major reason for lack of contact and, thus, the familiarity with facts she would have otherwise if they were not skewed on a religious basis.

Eventually we became good friends, and at her insistence one day in the teachers’ lunchroom, we sat and laughed our butts off as we played a sort of game, “What the Black Women say. What the Gays say”.

Other faculty members noticed that of all the people on the campus, this rather aloof woman, who kept mostly to herself and was known to be what one might consider in comparison to these days, a fetal Trumper, a situation from which she was saved by not only befriending her first Gay man, but, after the Gay man made  sure that she was seen clearly and at one point was featured, in the video of our well known strike pickets, making sure she was holding one of the best signs.

The similarities between Gay men and Black women speak was done as a lighthearted joking around, but, in truth, we both began to see the similarities in the treatment of both Blacks and Gays in this country, acknowledging that similarity neither means more, or equal. It just meant that these two separate groups had some experiences in common and we should help each other in those areas if not in all areas because of our links.

My surveys are not scientific, and as they are my observations, what conclusions I draw may be faulty, but the experiences upon which an opinion is formed cannot be denied.

My most recent observation of similarities is in the establishing of Juneteenth as a holiday. Because the historically isolated celebrations of Juneteenth among Blacks in the South, specifically Texas and Oklahoma, were community events out of eyesight of the White population that still had a problem with race, people outside the Southern Black population knew very little about how the people had been celebrating.

I have attended the real celebrations back when it was almost a counter-holiday that had to be secretly celebrated away from those who would be offended by it, especially in places where a secret race massacres could happen with no one addressing it until 100 years later.

I saw Juneteenth 2021 as the opportunity to compare how the holiday has been celebrated in the past according to its place of origin as opposed regional traditions that could be a form of celebration, but which lack the history and experience.

I attended two Northern observations, one at the NAACP headquarters campus where there was an attempt at tradition with some obvious tweaking. Cape Verdean food, although important in the Community of Color in my city, just was not part of traditional observations. It was some version of BBQ brisket and all the fixin’s, red soda, red velvet cake, and corn whiskey made by a trusted friend. To be clear, at this year’s inaugural celebration there was no corn whiskey, but those of us who knew, noted the absence.

The other observation was held on the historic estate of one of the richest whaling tycoons in the city’s history, a huge advocate for abolition and an activist in that having been instrumental in helping enslaved people after their self-emancipation, or closing an eye when ships were used as an alternative to the Underground Railroad. He was a friend of Frederick Douglass.

His gardened property and huge mansion just seemed to me to be a little too reminiscent of pre-bellum Southern plantations with white people gathered in the garden with a sprinkling of Black people. To acknowledge the solemnity of the holiday there were a lot of outfits that obviously are Sunday-go-to-meeting drag, and because of the nature and reputation of the estate and its historical importance, younger people would most likely avoid being there, and those who did attend dressed appropriate to the location. I would not have been surprised if at any point I was there, Scarlet came out of the house to stand on the veranda looking for Rhett.

The joy was there. The energy was there. The triumphal spirit of ancestors being remembered was there, but so were the festival booths, manicured lawns and flower beds, a looming mansion, people in groups conversing while sipping drinks, etc. so the whole visual was just not what I knew.

To me this is one more of those intersections between Gay and Black, if only as an opportunity to warn the Black Community to guard against the upcoming assault on the holiday by those who will define it from the outside and establish how it is represented and what those representations mean.

From a member of one group of people who have experienced discrimination, murder, threats to our families, jobs, and homes, and who needed to fight to get and protect the rights the Creator had already given us, to another whose own struggle though covering many of the same details had quite a few additional obstacles to overcome, a few words of caution.

The Gay Community only found out we were the LGBT Community because the media started using that letter sequence.

The Pride flag, the festivals and parades, and the commercial use of June to rake in profits were not well accepted in the beginning.

The beginning of Pride festivals and Parades wasn’t greeted with open arms. For years the news media, especially those that were evangelical televangelist owned, regardless of anything positive, ignored those things and concentrated on what could be controversial or offensive, depending on where someone was coming from in the judgment of others, showing selected videos on the news, printing the most outrageous pictures in newspapers, and promoting the idea that the festivals and parades were nothing more than an excuse for public lewdness.

I have been in a Pride Parade where a Baptist congregation ran into the marchers beating us with their ubiquitous leather-bound Bibles. Conservatives in the city where the parade was held wanted the city council to prevent the parade and deny the organizers any and all permits. Each year obstacles to help this along were created until the editor of the city newspaper pointed out that since the end of the city’s prominence as a seaside resort, the only parades they had anymore were the Gay Pride Parade and the elephants going from the train yard to the stadium where the circus was to perform. He wanted something more festive for tourists than just a row of trudging pachyderms.

In Oklahoma City, the KKK who had threatened the Community with attacking the marchers at the first Pride Parade there, being surprised how many Gay people came to the parade left before it began without having done anything. Annual coverage after that seemed to be a search for that which was most outside the norm to be used as a quick visual summary of the parade and festival for the purpose of presenting it as a threat to America, God, morality, country, and children.  After years of battles with the city about public acknowledgement of Pride Month and with the school district to add the words “sexual orientation and “gender identity” during which every morsel of anti-Gay bigotry was gleefully chewed by the administration who cared more about politicians and Baptist pastors as opposed the children under their care, the Parade and festival are now included in the state’s tourist guide and the school district has a presence in the Parade something unthinkable less than a decade before its first inclusion.

Once, in California, again a few decades ago now, the Gay Community in an Orange County town was advised to hold its first Pride Parade on a college campus because security would have had the advantage if the conservative groups carried through on their threat to drive the snakes out of the garden. As we marched, to our right was a line of angry people, some with the Stars and Bars and some with signs about pedophilia and damnation lined up at the top of the rise that followed the road. To our left was a happier mirror image of supporters lined atop the opposite rise, cheering as we passed.

Times changed. More people came out. It became increasingly more difficult to find the desired disgusting image. Corporations began to notice that there were a lot of people at these events, and they all needed to eat and drink, not only on Pride Weekend, but for the whole month, and beyond.

Corporations saw dollars where they along with society in general refused to see people.

The first Pride Flag was one made by community members and was a little more upbeat than the previously used Community symbol, the Pink Triangle, worn by the Gay inmates in Nazi concentration camps who were exploited as workers to clean out the very camps they had been dying in when others were liberated, returned to prison because technically they had not violated Nazi law as the Jews, Gypsies, and others had, but an anti-sodomy law which the United States basically agreed with, and were left out of history, denied any compensation because they were lawbreaking sodomites, and left off plaques at former camps bearing the list the groups held there such as the one at Dachau with the EU Parliament only recognizing their existence in 2005.

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The Community use of the Pink triangle was a form of reclamation, taking power out of a symbol by taking it back.

Obviously, this was not as cheerful as a rainbow.

Companies, mostly national brewers with nothing to lose if the experiment went wrong, seeing the crowds, noting the temperatures in June, knowing they could hand out for free barrels of their worst beer that only tasted good because it was fee and plentiful as there was no competition from another company as breweries began to sponsor festivals, and after counting the rubles, saw how lucrative things could be if, besides sponsoring one event, slapping a rainbow on any product and knowing that the Gay Community, like all communities, had members who could be fooled with the rainbow and would even spread the falsity that we as a people were being validated by the attention we were getting, could make more money.

I mean, just look at the rainbows everywhere on everything.

Spoiler.

Corporations know how to sell product. They know what to appeal to the most people willing to buy what they are selling both in physical product and false validation. They know how to rely on those who like moths to candles will jump to anything with a rainbow on it convinced it presence means something more cosmic than a gimmick.

Here’s some info for the Sallie Fields among us who bask in the adoration of their Gayness by corporate America.

I have friends in the Southwest who got the vapors when, upon entering a CVS, they came face to face with a huge Rainbow adorned, “you go, Gays!”, paper goods and wearable things you would own but never wear. In Texas, CVS backed Republican state senators Dawn Buckingham and Bryan Hughes, who co-sponsored SB1646 to make it a crime for parents to allow children to receive gender-affirming medical care.

In North Carolina the company backed state senator Ralph Hise, primary sponsor of S514, a law to ban anyone under 21 from receiving gender-affirming treatment, four years after his defense of the state’s anti-trans “bathroom bill”, so CVS knew who was getting their money.

Further CVS has donated $259,000 to 54 members of Congress who oppose the Equality Act and vote against it anytime it comes up.

But, hey, they sell rainbow stuff during June.

Although Xfinity tweeted, “Pride is the love we share. And with Xfinity, it’s Pride all year,” and its parent company, Comcast, created “a virtual ‘Pride World’ featuring “Pride events, Pride floats, Pride flags, and even a Pronoun Guide for employees”, Comcast has donated more than $1.1m to anti-GLBT politicians since 2019, including, no surprise,  $30,000 to the sponsors of anti-trans legislation in Florida and Texas,  and another $1,095,500 to 149 anti-Gay members of Congress.

Walmart with its website featuring a “pride and Joy” section has donated at least $442,000 to 121 anti-GLBT politicians.

AT&T, while going with “We can #TURNUPTHELOVE for LGBTQ youth together”, has supported sponsors of Anti-Transgender legislation in Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida.

Wells Fargo, to me always a shady bank, supports Heritage of Pride, the non-profit that plans and produces New York City’s Pride events, and donated funds to the openly and vocally anti-Trans North Carolina state senator Joyce Krawiec.

Many, even those who were there at Stonewall and have been active in GLBT rights ever since, have seen the influence of the corporation as the parade has become overly commercial allowing a party to erase what the whole thing is actually about and is getting organizers more into the glitzy corporate than the gritty real person on the street.

The parade has become all glitz and fabulousness that screams that corporations just love The Gays. Not needed and so erased are the seamier, unpleasant things like the people who had been at the Stonewall that night in June, the still existing struggles, the need not to forgot what got us to this point so we don’t see them taking it all away with us having no recourse but to turn to those who are offending us to redress their wrongs.

Our history is being rewritten by those who make a profit from us (Do I have to mention the Stonewall movie?), but that’s okay. I got a pair of rainbowed running shoes real cheap on the internetwebs, and I don’t even run. I bought it to pay back that company’s love.

General Motors claims it has a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but then has to explain that its political contributions

“do not represent an endorsement of the candidate or support for all the issues the candidate supports [and] we will continue to clearly communicate with policymakers GM’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion”.

However a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion would call for looking at any politician’s stance on those issues before giving them money. You don’t give candidates money because they wear nice ties, you pick the ones close to your own thinking. Donating to, let’s say, an anti-GLBT candidate by accident or dint of whimsey just does not happen.

Google and Amazon claimed a version of the same thing saying that a contribution doesn’t mean they agree with a candidate on every issue.

Again, however, if they are making contributions to candidates who have as part of their agenda preventing, limiting, or removing GLBT human and civil, creator endowed rights, the commitment to the community is at best commercially beneficial and they show the love by rainbowing up their logos, offering everything they could slap a rainbow on as an on sale, every-Gay-just-cannot-live-without item that we just cannot resist purchasing now that the thing we never wanted now has a rainbow on it.

Now I am waiting to see how, after observing the ways people celebrated Juneteenth, corporate America swoops in to capitalize on Juneteenth by unilaterally establishing what is required for a true celebration, what symbols will be used, and what is best to slap on beer cans.

We get a month of rainbows used to distract us from reality and it is working with way too many. Juneteenth got a unanimous vote in the Senate clearly to show America and the world that we have no racism here, jangling this vote at us like keys on a ring being jangled in front of a newborn.

What Juneteenth’s rainbow on a beer can equivalent will want us to miss is that half the members of that majority has voted against even discussing a voter rights law and refuses to honestly deal with racism in our history in schools and the body politick, some form of reparations to help a whole class of people who actively denied the opportunities to attain the American dream forcing them to live in conditions created by others who profited from that, and to honestly examine policing in the United States to make it better and less violent, violent sometimes to the extreme.

We get, “We slapped a rainbow on it.”

Juneteenth gets, “We slapped a holiday on it.”

Do not let corporations appropriate Juneteenth as they have done so well with Gay Pride.

Don’t let them establish the national holiday template complete with symbolism and sayings from people that actually had nothing to do with Juneteenth other than they’re Black, establishing the traditions as in food, drink, and decorations, and saying they obviously love you until all returns to normal on June 20 and they continue donating money to politicians and organizations that work against you passing the donations in the shadow of  anything with an African weaving design.

Don’t let them take it away, and do not let the younger people latch on to the commercial story as opposed the actual history.

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