The Ends of Pride
"These are my politics"
Blake and I have a new episode of Off Christopher Street out today about Pride—the parade, the month, the discourses—in which we talk about this lovely little Andrew Holleran essay. You can find the pod on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all other platforms.
This Pride month marks five years since I came out very belatedly, and that thankfully now-unusual-if-still-not-unheard-of trajectory is perhaps why I haven’t had many long years in which to grow bored with and jaded about the Pride routine. I haven’t, to be honest, even had that much time to figure out how I felt about it politically, or if I even felt anything political about; for the most part, for the first few years, Pride was an occasion for a massive annual catharsis, a cyclically renewed wonder at what my life was able to become and bafflement that it took so long to get there. It was, at least initially, the opposite of politics, the opposite of everything I had unhealthily spent my life forces on as a substitute for the basic matter of, and I’m afraid there’s no way to improve on the cliché, “being myself.”
As I talk about in the episode, the sequence of events unfolded in way that, whether this was truly accurate or not, one of the vectors on which I experienced coming out was as a transition from being a left-wing intellectual to being a gay, I’m not sure what, lost person? Failure? Fuck-up? (Blake sums it up as: “Bernie Sanders Made Me Gay: The David Sessions Story”; to be slightly more precise, “Bernie Sanders Losing Made Me Gay.”) I obviously approached becoming gay as any PhD-haver would, by reading “the literature,” but there was simply no way I was going to come out of the gate at the same level of erudition I had on other subjects that, almost overnight, and much to my chagrin, seemed no longer to hold any interest.
In retrospect I think this was a good thing; for maybe the first time since college in my early 20s, life was so much that I was forced to just live it without being able to theorize it or affix some sort of intellectual framework for interpreting it. It was tempting to try to continue doing what I had been doing, just the gay version of it; to start parroting gay left stuff about how identity politics was neoliberalism, or gay marriage was baleful centrist “assimilationism” that only did any good for rich cis white gays (“did little for queer people on the factory floor,” in one particularly obtuse formulation). But I couldn’t do it. It all sounded so hollow, performative, and nostalgic. When one of my little brothers got married, my mind couldn’t help but drift to how radical it would be to have a second wedding, to force all of these same people, all the people whose love and approval my first wedding had been a performance to secure, to watch me kiss and dance with a man. To do it in my hometown, no less, where even in my childhood, people’s gay sons disappeared and were only mentioned in hush tones. They would do it, probably—the world had changed in my lifetime and so had they—but it still wouldn’t be easy, it would be uncomfortable, it would be an event, a thing that still doesn’t happen.
I even had the thought, in those first years, looking out across all the boys in the club every weekend, the beautiful and the non-beautiful all doing the same things together, all kissing each other, almost as one: “These are my people. This is the only thing I know for sure I believe in.” I would often say to other people, “Don’t you love being gay?” They would always agree, and sometimes someone else would say something like, “Can you believe we are grown-ass adult men and we get to do this?” I would like to think I thought the words, “These are my politics,” but my memory is terrible and that would probably be too perfect. But a line in Holleran’s essay—which I forgot to bring up on the show—did immediately grab me as a version of something I had thought before. As his mood flatlines into a post-march depression, Holleran says:
Later that night I would go to my local park and watch the men on the benches and think: These are my politics. And sometimes meet a man who had marched himself, and if I was lucky, end the long, dusty day with the unspoken agenda of that army of men: a kiss on the lips.
At first it may have felt vaguely “bad” or anti-political to have a thought like, This—these people, this scene before me—is the only thing I believe in. Maybe tribal or even nationalistic, like I was now letting down the wretched of the earth I had previously appointed myself as a spokesman of, by only caring about my people. But over time it became clear not only that that old interpretation of myself was to a large extent a performance, one that had a lot to do with my own vanity and ambition (not that there’s anything wrong with vanity and ambition); that not one thing would be different for the workers of the world if I chose to think about gay people instead. More importantly, that these were not opposites, that, on the contrary, gay people were who I belonged to, they were a community in which I was already organically embedded, and therefore might—not certainly, but certainly more than the general category of “the working class”—be able to do something about, do something for.
We chose that Holleran essay almost randomly because it was about Pride, but it turned out to express quite beautifully, almost off-handedly, how politics can emerge from a relatively straightforward attachment to what one loves. The Pride march is not a political program or an ideology, but a ritual or a practice that holds open a space that can be turned as needed toward different ends. It’s not a protest by definition, but it can become a protest if one is needed. Five years in, this is something like what my “gay politics” have become, not trying to figure out the correct ideology we should have or pronounce on What is to Be Done, but to start from a fact of experience: the gay world exists and thrives, its inhabitants understand and believe in it intuitively, even if they currently have little more than memes, tweets and Instagram reels as tools to elaborate it or reflect it back to themselves. To want to preserve, love, and carry on that world is a different kind of politics, but one that has the virtue of not being almost entirely abstract.
Pride is, for me, always a time of gratitude, and this year I will risk embarrassing Blake with my sap to say I am indebted to him for being a model of that and doing so much spadework that made it easier for me—and hopefully many others in the future—to find my way. It’s a great pleasure to talk through the gay world with him.
Finding the Right Life
In what I somehow still didn’t know then would be the final days of my straight life, I made a list of the pros and cons of ending my marriage and coming out. On the positive side were the things I’d begun to see on the horizon as thrilling possibilities, but they were all amorphous and hypothetical, distant question marks. “A holistic sense of self,” I…