As May begins, we need to prepare ourselves, to brace ourselves, for the commercialization and, hence, the discounting of the meaning of the Rainbow Pride Flag as corporations who usually donate to far-right conservative organizations and politicians during the year begin to start slapping rainbow flags on all their products to attract younger Gay people who get all excited seeing a rainbow Pride Merch display in a store that is surprising and then assume that is a sign of an ever-widening acceptance like fish assuming those worms descending from the surface are gifts of love and acceptance.
Walmart is seen by some to be Pro-Gay because they have items with rainbows on them with many being just designs based on the primary colors of the rainbow even as they have no relevance to Pride and its meaning.
I worked at a local discount retail outlet in a resort area during the off season when I first moved back to Massachusetts after retirement. Regardless of the holiday, all the chatchkies and googahs relevant to one holiday would be packed up in the warehouse where the nonperishable and non- time window sensitive items were packed away until the following year, with plush animals, like Easter chicks, getting tossed into the clearance bin as heaven knows what they would be collecting as they sat in boxes for ten month in a dark, dank warehouse, while the perishables would arrive within days of the store preparing for the next holiday. The public might be surprised when holiday materials suddenly appear months before a holiday not knowing they were not just shipped there but are, to a great extent, some of the same items they saw last year, and will again the next depending on sales.
All the Easter things that would appear to be fresh during the Lenten season were the same things that had been on the shelf unsold during the most recent season and spent 10 months out of the year in boxes in the holiday area in the warehouse until they were needed again.
That little cute Eater chick, if it could age with the years, would actually be so old as to outlive a chicken’s normal life expectancy. There was nothing religious about the Easter and Chanuka detritus sitting in those ignored boxes for 10 months a year.
Every year a shipment of New England Patriots merch would arrive at the beginning of the season and would be put out for sale, but while they were being bought and sold, another box of Patriots outerwear sat yearly in the warehouse only to be brought out if the Pats won the championship and the Super Bowl cleverly omitting any year so they could come out of storage when needed.
The long and short of it was that the merch had no meaning beyond its purpose to make profit.
The merch for Gay pride does not mean acceptance but profit, that spikes for one month because ATT that supports One America News throws a Rainbow onto its logo.
The Community itself is not immune to this and shamefully uses Pride to raise money.
Gay and Lesbian bars used to be places of refuge in an unfriendly world. Whether a high-class dance club or some dive mixed in with derelict buildings in the dying parts of towns, they were places where a Gay or Lesbian person could go where they were welcome.
And, before anyone gets rhapsodic about going to where “everyone knows your name”, in the bars back then no one really knew your name only the sobriquet used in that bar. I knew three Garys, Crazy Gary, Pawn-Shop Gary, and Gimpy Gary. I assumed they were al, really Garys , but none of them might not have been. It was a year after I received a Facebook posting of the death of someone I supposedly knew in another state but whose posted name I did not know, that I found out one of the Gary’s real names.
At holiday times, the bars were places where those who were rejected by family replaced the one that rejected them with their chosen family. It was also a place to go after a holiday with family where you could be relaxed and not have to speak in code or deflect the potential grandmothers’ asking when you will give them grandchildren with questions about your on-going bachelorhood.
Cities had a variety of bars with some always having cover charges to get in, a subtle way to discriminate by class among ourselves, but most only doing so on special occasions with many bars not having cover charges, becoming spaces for not only the disenfranchised, but the poor or down on their luck among us. Although the owners might prefer that anyone in the bar should be buying drinks, having been there themselves, they know that some people are there for community and cannot afford a drink.
In my favorite bar of all time, the clientele was so eclectic that some lowly, down on his luck person could be sharing a drink with the judge they had just faced during the day., or during a drag show I could turn to the person near me to make a comment and end up assuring a school district administrator that his secret was safe with me (and it still is).
This bar never had a cover charge.
All charity events there raised money from the tips of the female impersonators, and, as it turned out after each fundraiser, a large amount of money, often more than was raised at a cover charge bar for the same cause. None turned away from the door when they saw a cover charge sign, and once in and sufficiently lubricated, patrons were very free with their tips. People were free to wander in and out, and usually had their bar-hopping bring them back to this bar.
But, when a special event charges an entrance fee, sometimes the price of two drinks, in a town with only one Gay bar, or few, alternatives for these people to go to aren’t there, so, they are excluded from the community.
It might be one night, but a person might have needed that one night.
Such fundraising cover charges come on weekends when people, whether rich or poor, want to go out with friends, but they lose money as people walk away from a $10 cover charge rather than come in and while enjoying the evening give a tip or two to the entertainers. I have seen people who I know to have been on tough times come to the cover chargeless bar, buy one drink, and after hanging around a bit, tip the entertainer on the way out. That was a lot of mite for the widow to give, and the simple gesture was silently enormous.
It was one more dollar for the charity, a dollar it might not have gotten.
As we ignore the historical realities of 1969 in the scramble for heroes, with each decade since 1969 a new group within the GLBT Community claims it was someone with whom they identify who got the whole Stonewall Rebellion started. Even as two such icons had repeatedly pointed out that they either weren’t present the first night or only arrived long after the event had begun, if they were there at all, as we praise the street kids who took care of the street part of the night while also praising those who were handling things inside the bar, in spite of the significance and meaning of that event it is these very people we lock out to raise money in their name and who are not welcome in the A-Gay events.
The first time I walked in a Pride Parade it was in Boston in the 1980s. The route went from the Fenway area, down Boylston Street to the Boston Common for the festival and speeches. In the area in front of the final police car signaling the end of the parade and the last official contingent, people could join in the march to the Common. I was living in the Fenway neighborhood at the time and made a huge bedsheet sized cartoon of the building in which I lived and some of the residents hanging out the windows or around the building and we stepped behind the last contingent marching as the Queens of Queensbury, the street the front façade of the building faced.
Can’t do that now.
There are fees.
There are too many bars that allow Rights and Community support networks to hold fundraisers during Pride Month when they have the rest of the year to raise funds, and in so doing exclude those who cannot pay the cover, or choose not to, like myself, because I will not pay to celebrate my Pride and my life experiences and triumphs.
They know the patrons will be there, so why not milk the cash cow., the captive audience
You can choose to spend your money at Walmart if you so choose, but you do not have to. You can walk in and walk out without having purchased anything. You are not forced to go in and buy some loosely relevant rainbow motif bearing item before you can continue shopping.
It is totally wrong and choiceless if you could not enter unless you bought something first.
Pride may come with a corporate price tag, but it should not come with a GLBT Community 0ne. No one should have to pay to celebrate Pride with friends especially when limited venues lock people out.
Irony is when an organization whose mission is to be a support to the GLBT Community, all of it, is responsible for the sporadic exclusion at the bar to raise money to help the very people they have locked out.
My simple desire is that we to stop charging people for inclusion in Pride specific activities where few venues are available, buy your Pride merch where it is always available, resist being the deer in corporate headlights, and stop being part of or supporting of the sacrilegious and insulting commercializing of Pride.
It began as a riot, not a party, and it was begun by the people who cannot afford expensive merch and cover charges.
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