Gay Pride Is For Getting Drunk

I have never been sober—not even once—at a single gay pride festival.

My first gay pride festival was in 1996 in Orange County, California (this was back when Orange County still had a gay pride festival; they stopped doing them around 2000 but then brought a scaled-down version of the festival back in 2009), and because I was only 19, I had to smuggle in a pint of vodka that I later mixed with a Sprite. By 5pm, I was drunk and making out with a Latin guy in the Latin tent or maybe it was a cowboy in the country tent. The point of going to Pride, for me, has always been to get drunk and then have sex with someone.

Look, here I am at Long Beach Pride (my Pride of choice, since Long Beach, California was where I lived for most of my 20’s) in 2009 pouring booze into a water bottle just off the parade route. Yes, I’m blurring out the faces of all my friends because they might not be as “proud” of their behavior as me.

Here I am again at LB Pride 2009, this time with two BFFs, a 32 oz. beer in a brown paper bag, and a cigarette (I’ve since quit smoking, thank you very much).

Here I am at LB Pride 2008 with some of my tranny friends and an alcoholic beverage disguised as a soda from Taco Bell.

Oh, and here I am later that night making out with someone. Even before I blurred his photo, I couldn’t remember his name!

And here is one of my favorite Long Beach Prides, back in 2003 or possibly 2004. I didn’t know it at the time, but my friend snapped this photo of me behind her just as I was vomiting. I’d been drinking all day.

I don’t really drink like this anymore (OK, yes I do, but maybe not to the point of throwing up), and I don’t go to Pride festivals as often (because once you’re in your 30’s, doing Jager shots and trying to jump on the Long Beach Mayor’s float isn’t cute anymore), but I can say that some of the best, most happiest, most insane, and most cherished memories of my life have been made at Pride festivals. None of these memories really have anything to do with being “proud” of being gay and none of them really even have anything to do with anything gay at all (expect for the awful gay sex I vaguely remember having). And to be honest, I can’t even remember most of these memories, but I know that if I could, they’d be amazing.

The point is, I love Pride festivals for everything they offer and everything I chose to make of them. I’d like to thank all of the Wells Fargos and Banks of America, the Bacardis and Bud Lights and Jose Cuervos, the Swiss Navy and Wet! lube companies, the airlines, the car companies, the grocery stores, the Boeings, the McDonnell Douglas’s, the Targets, the Gaps, the Hertz Rental Cars, and every other corporate sponsor who made it possible for my friends and me to get belligerently drunk in public and have completely anonymous sex behind the teriyaki chicken on a stick booth.

Today, I read this in the LA Weekly, by Patrick Range McDonald:

Muscled go-go boys shaking their booties on one parade float after another, cock-ring tosses to win a stuffed animal, Bud Light and Bacardi sponsoring an event for a community with consistently high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction — and the same damn music with the same tweaker beat.

Does this make L.A Gay Pride kind of stale and outdated? Are we celebrating some kind of pre-AIDS, 1970s version of the gay experience? When sexual liberation in gay culture was just as important — and justifiably so — as equality? Are we coming off passe and immature by still celebrating our gay heritage as if we’re a bunch of horny, drunk 19-year-olds who came out of the closet a few weekends ago?

The short answer to those questions is an unqualified yes…

As a former horny and drunk 19-year-old who experienced his first gay pride back in 1996, I’d like to say that I would be offended, but I’d probably be too drunk and horny to care. Let’s push the stick firmly planted in McDonald’s ass even deeper:

But each year, L.A. Pride more and more resembles one of those middle-aged gay men who was hot in his 20s, drank and drugged too much into his 30s, still acts and dresses as if he’s 21 although he’s 42 (and got a new arm-sleeve tattoo to prove he’s still with it), and is still looking for action at the Abbey.

A number of gay men and those in the larger LGBT community have begun to see L.A. Pride as a sad spectacle, particularly since being gay is much more than wearing trendy clothes, sporting tattoos and muscles, and sleeping with whomever comes your way.

[…]

[O]nce again L.A. Pride will bring out the go-go boys and cock rings, will be partly underwritten by liquor companies, and will celebrate stereotypes and outdated notions of what it means to be gay. And then we’ll wonder why certain straight folks don’t take us seriously or think we’re stuck in some kind of “Peter Pan syndrome” — and we’ll cry bloody murder when we’re treated poorly.

Well, as the old saying goes, if you don’t want to be treated like a slut, don’t act and look like one.

That kind of slut-shaming is classic “blame the victim” rhetoric. You know, when the pretty girl in the short skirt gets raped because, after all, she is a pretty girl in a short skirt. But McDonald also assumes that somewhere out there is a drunk gay slut tossing cock rings who actually wants to be taken seriously by “certain straight folks.” Maybe that drunk gay slut is proud of being a drunk gay slut, and it’s McDonald who doesn’t take him seriously—not straight people. Maybe it’s McDonald who wants straight people to take him “seriously” (whatever that even means), which is about as outdated, passe, and sad as it gets. What could be more immature than looking to others for acceptance and approval?

The fact that all of the advances in gay rights have occurred over the past decade in spite of the continuing spectacle of drunk gay sluts tossing cock rings at Pride tells me that a) straight people simply aren’t paying attention to drunk gay slut cock ring tossing or b) straight people are paying attention to drunk gay slut cock ring tossing and they think it’s great.

But over the past decade, we have clearly moved into a more enlightened era in which we’re not just fighting for our right to dance with each other or have sex with someone of the same gender — we’re fighting for our right to serve our country, to legally marry the person we love, to be out and not be fired for it and to play in professional sports without some kind of retribution.

To simply maintain our right to party and hook up with whomever we wish seems so 1970s, doesn’t it? So, ah, adolescent.

Isn’t that what everyone of every age, straight and gay, is fighting for? The right to party and get laid? From Mardi Gras to the Superbowl to St. Patrick’s Day to Cinco de Mayo to New Year’s Eve to Nascar races to 4th of July to every single sporting, holiday, ethnic or cultural celebration, everyone wants to party. And just like Pride, all of those events have been 100% co-opted and commodified by corporate interests. And who cares? Everyone and everything in every aspect of life has been whored out, so why not make the most of it? After all, where else but Pride can you open a Citibank checking account while drinking an Absolut Flirtini mere seconds after getting your dick sucked in a port-o-potty?

Maybe we should bring L.A. Pride back to its roots and make it once again a political statement. To highlight our contributions to society, and to reach out in meaningful ways to our straight allies, our parents, and extended families.

Maybe we should highlight a particular battle we’re fighting on the front lines of gay rights and make that the centerpiece of the gay pride parade, rather than make a straight celebrity a grand marshal, which then diverts publicity toward him or her and away from the important issues we’re facing.

Maybe we should ban sponsors entirely, raise money from within the community, forget the $20-per-person festival that’s more a place for corporate sponsors to sell their wares than anything else, and just throw one helluva soul-touching, all-inspiring march.

Maybe he should stay away from Pride, and leave it for the drunk gay sluts. Who is Patrick Range McDonald to pass judgment on what someone else’s celebration of Pride should be?

One of the great things about being gay and one of the fundamental tenets of “gayness” as I have always understood it is that we are the ones who are accepting of pretty much everyone. We are the ones who celebrate the outrageous and the controversial and the shunned and the slutty. We, as individuals, get to decide for ourselves what we’re proud of, how much we want to drink, how many cock rings we want to toss, and who we want to hook up with. No one person—not even a columnist for the LA Weekly—gets to tell everyone else “how it should be” or what Pride means. Besides, we already have Wells Fargo, Bud Light, Bud Light Lime, Bacardi, Boeing, Virgin America, Clear Channel, Comcast, Whole Foods, Smirnoff, AT&T, and Kaiser Permanente to do that.

 

 

14 thoughts on “Gay Pride Is For Getting Drunk”

  1. Another thing that irritates me, is the martyrdom that some in the industry and even on the web, have taken up against “slut-shaming” in our culture.

    All I have to say is, in really, where is this “slut-shaming” to begin with? We have an heiress with a perfume brand, who also has teenage twitter following, basically known for doing an amateur porn? We have a reality show based on the notoriety of a family and their daughter, whose known works include a porno tape with a defunct child actor/”rapper”? Are we suggest that society has this problem still?-when all our reality stars are drunk and basically tweeting nude pics and porno flicks?

    Can someone prove slut-shamming exists? Really?

    The pornofication of our culture has taken over. We are a culture with no demureness or shame. Cause having those would make us a nobody: with no followers on twitter, facebook, or myspace. It is the facade of being known, or having a following that makes us feel “important;” like people really should care what we think or what we know-Basically because we run around nude on cam or fuck some random people. It doesn’t matter that we aren’t known for our minds, just as long as it is our bodies. And to the generations of people out there, who really cares what the difference is?

    So do we really need a sexual “revolution,” still? Every prohibition on sex has been repealed, first starting with birth control and now with gay sex. So does “slut-shamming” exist at all anymore? Um, I guess not. This isn’t Uganda Africa and this isn’t the middle east. Women aren’t getting stoned for being raped in our culture. In fact, if they decide to basically shoot and stab their ex 26 times, they basically get a plea of insanity from mental anguish and abuse their suffered.

    I think the problem isn’t slut-shamming in this culture, I think it is the mentally “checking out” that is the problem.

  2. You were 19 in 1996? Ha ha ha. You are older than me! Maybe you should be the one in the wheelchair with porn models sitting on your lap? :D

  3. Also, for some people getting drunk and having sex is just another Tuesday. So why do we need a “special” day to do something we could do every-night or every weekend?

    It seems, like in a lot of other communities, there are those pulling the weight and the rest just carelessly coasting and causing more problems.

  4. Zach, I think you doth protest too much — which means that what McDonald wrote struck a nervous chord with you. Looks like you both take Pride too seriously.

    There are great and meaningful moments at Pride — Mary Griffith marching with PFLAG after the suicide of her son Bobby comes to mind. The moment in “Prayers for Bobby” when this former homophobe sees a young, teenage parade as her son Bobby, whom she walks over and hugs is heartbreakingly poignant. And awesome.

    But like lolz said, it’s mostly an excuse to get drunk and have sex. Which is fine, too.

    What does that say, together? Well, Pride is like everything else in that it has good, bad, and ugly. It is what is is. Since everybody has a point, Pride needs neither outraged scolding nor furious defenses.

  5. Some want a return to 60’s activism; others want to keep 70’s hedonism.

    If you want to get shitfaced, that is your prerogative. But I don’t think it is about civil rights when you want to get drunk and have blowjobs. Let us call it what is, as indicated by the “hetero” examples you gave: an excuse to party. Perfectly normal. However, not exactly fitting within the political agenda.

    Plus, it seems very awkward to have corporate sponsors, only because they can pull out when they don’t like the marshal or some other aspects in the planning. They control the agenda of the parade, not the coordinators. As indicated by the SF parade, who suddenly dropped Bradley Manning. Who do you think stomped their foot down and told them to drop their first choice? Their sponsors and corporate affiliate members.

    Now why would “PRIDE” need corporate sponsors in the first place?
    Oh I know, someone has to flip the bill for the “party” aspects of this event.

    You all can just ignore the facts, or even the logic behind this argument. Cause who am I to ruin your good time?

  6. i don’t know what pride parades mcdonald has been attending these last few years but all the ones i’ve seen have always included marriage equality and the right to serve openly, not to mention many other issues that affect the gay community. from what i have gathered by googling this guy he is a white man who is a member of a 12 step program and he lives in west hollywood. that could be one of the reasons he hates pride so much because it causes such a traffic nightmare making it nearly impossible to get to his meetings. being an ex drunk may have something to do with his obvious obsession/aversion to alcohol. he also seems to have a problem with gay men having casual sex with each other. why would he care about what people do with their sex lives? jealousy maybe? caring about who other people fuck sounds very christian and straight to me. and speaking of straight what’s all this worry he has about straight people giving us their acceptance. who gives a shit what they think, we just want our equal rights. i don’t think all the strides that have been made in the lgbt community were made possible by gays who were worried about what the heteros think. as for this “peter pan syndrome” gays are always accused of having has mr. mcdonald not noticed all the older straight men driving fancy cars and marrying much younger women. or hordes of straight women having so much plastic surgery they can hardly move their faces. the quest for eternal youth is hardly limited to gay people. oh well now i’m just rambling. i guess what it comes down to is at least there will be one less “bitter betty” at pride this year because after all his gibberish about the festival he surely wouldn’t have the nerve to attend, would he? oh maybe just to do research for his follow up piece.
    *
    by the way zach, wanted to commend you on what a great job you did on this post. and some of your early pride experiences sound hauntingly familiar.

  7. You forgot to mention one of the biggest parts of pride is the rampant drug use, bareback sex behind port-a-poties and the inevitable regret/shame and visit to the clinic the week after. “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS DISCHARGE????”

  8. Have not been to a pride event since going to the one in Flagstaff in 2008. I used to look forward to them, but now that I am single and middle aged, I feel even more self-conscious around other gay men. But, I have to say that I have never gotten drunk at a pride event.

    I thought you were in your 20’s now Zach. It must be the vat of Oil of Olay you use every morning. =)

  9. This is a great rebuttal, Zach. McDonald turns a blind eye to the political action that does go on along with the Pride parade. And, as you pointed out, partying is a natural condition of humans, straight or gay. Mostly people who are “so over Pride” are dullards.

  10. Although I wasn’t surprised that Zach abused alcohol, I was shocked to learn that he is a white guy with facial hair because I always saw him as a fellow minority who’s great in drag.

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