The Perversion of Pride

"Pride parades now look and feel more like a victory march over a conquered people ..."  Because that's exactly what they are! They think they've won.

From The European Conservative

By Lauren Smith

Pride parades now look and feel more like a victory march over a conquered people than a scrappy revolt for rights.

Pride Month seems to come round quicker and quicker each year. Every June, we are subjected to the colours of the rainbow being injected into every aspect of our lives. Businesses change their logos for the occasion. Your bank will fire out emails to breathlessly reassure you that it doesn’t care who you do or don’t sleep with. Pride parades erupt across every town and city, big or small, in Europe, making the high streets temporarily unusable.  

Not so in Hungary. In February, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán announced that this year’s Pride parade in Budapest would not go ahead. If it did, he warned, it could break child-protection laws against the public promotion of homosexuality and transgender ideology. The government instead suggested the event might be held in an enclosed venue, like a stadium, to prevent under-18s from watching the spectacle. Budapest’s mayor has nonetheless vowed that the parade will go ahead this weekend, as part of a ‘Day of Freedom’ organised by the city council. 

This has, of course, infuriated Brussels. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has urged the Hungarian government to back down on its ban and to allow Pride to go ahead. She declared: “In Europe, marching for your rights is a fundamental freedom. You have the right to love who you want to love and be exactly who you are.” 

The thing is, Pride has long ceased to be about marching for rights, particularly in the West. Yes, in Hungary same-sex marriages are not recognised (although LGBT people can opt for registered partnerships), making it an outlier in Europe. But how much of the rainbow-coloured, leather-clad display put on in the streets of European cities every year is really about “rights”? It is surely less about anything as tangible as marriage or adoption or an equal age of consent, and more about receiving mass validation for a way of life. 

In the depths of Pride Month, it’s worth reflecting on what Pride actually means. Is it, as von der Leyen would have it, a march for fundamental rights? Is it a celebration of identity and of love? Or is it, as Andrew Doyle described it a few years ago, “a self-satirising celebration of narcissism, where avaricious corporations can pose as virtuous by merely flying a flag and tossing off a few hashtags.” I think these days, most people would be inclined to say the latter. 

In the 1960s, the fight for gay rights was exactly that. It was first of all a fight, in that there were actual riots and violent confrontations between activists and the police—the Stonewall riots of 1969 were very explicitly a pushback against the U.S. state’s persecution of sexual minorities. And it was, second, for rights, in that campaigners were attempting to decriminalise homosexual acts. They wanted the state to stop interfering in their private lives. 

Contrast that with now, when ‘gay rights’—which by now have turned into ‘LGBT rights’—has become a desperate plea for the state to interfere in people’s private lives as much as possible. It is not enough for same-sex couples to be able to get married and live their lives in peace—the ins and outs of their relationships must be taught to schoolchildren everywhere. It is not enough for people to merely nod politely when confronted with a Brendan who has become ‘Brenda’—they must actively and enthusiastically affirm their identity. 

Today, the LGBT movement is a campaign for governments to recognise, validate, and celebrate as many different identities as possible. In fact, garden-variety gays hardly even get a look-in in the modern LGBT movement. The focus is far less on the L and the G and more on the B, T, Q, I, A ,and all the rest. Having achieved all the original goals of the gay rights campaign years ago, the movement has been forced to warp into some hideous Frankenstein’s monster of an acronym. It’s not enough to champion lesbian women and gay men. What about the pansexuals, the asexuals, the nonbinaries, the ‘queers’? The assault on the eyes known as the Progress Pride flag even has stripes to represent black and brown people, as if that should be considered a separate sexuality now. If your activism isn’t ‘intersectional’ enough, you may as well be a foaming-at-the-mouth bigot. Gay conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan often writes about the perniciousness of the ‘queer’ activism that replaced the gay rights movement, focussing more on a kind of nonconformist conformity than on real, genuine tolerance and acceptance. 

Even sexual fetishes get a prominent place at Pride now. Jillian Michaels, an openly gay American fitness personality, described in the Daily Mail last week how Pride has been “hijacked” by “leather daddies in assless chaps simulating sex acts in public” and “drag queens twerking in thongs in front of children.” What were once “civil-rights celebrations,” she wrote, now “look more like adult fetish conventions.” She’s right. There has been an overt push by Pride organisers to make the parades more ‘inclusive’ of “pups, furries and kinksters.” This has led to grotesque footage of men in their underwear and fetish gear dancing provocatively in front of children at a parade in California recently. Or videos of people in BDSM and leather ‘puppy play’ outfits marching through the streets of Toronto in broad daylight. I have yet to see a convincing explanation as to what any of this has to do with the struggle for gay or, more precisely, LGBT rights. 

Perhaps the even more sinister turn that Pride has taken is the ‘celebration’ of bodily mutilation. Having largely won both the legal battle for rights and the cultural battle against homophobia, they have had to pivot to what they saw as the next great front of the fight for equality. That is, transgender ideology. Organisations like Stonewall—the UK’s leading LGBT charity—have adopted wholesale the belief that gender is something a person can identify their way in or out of. A man can become a woman simply by saying so, and the burden is placed on the rest of society to affirm him, regardless of how convincingly he ‘passes’. In many Pride celebrations, the T now trumps the rest of the acronym. Lesbians have even been forced out of parades in the UK when they dared object to the presence of men pretending to be women. At a Pride march in Paris in 2021, trans activists appeared to fire off flares at lesbians who refused to accept that women can have penises. In 2022, Fred Sergeant—the co-founder of the very first ever Pride march in 1970 and one of the last surviving participants of the Stonewall riots—was kicked to the ground and spat on for protesting against the “misogyny” and “homophobia” of the trans movement. That has got to be the most damning indictment of just how warped the aims of the LGBT movement have become. No wonder more and more companies are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with celebrating it. 

The reality is, Pride parades now look and feel more like a victory march over a conquered people than a scrappy revolt for rights. The streets are lined with flags (the new Progress kind, of course, not the old-fashioned, probably prejudiced rainbow kind), businesses are forced to profess their loyalty to the new regime, schools hold special LGBT-affirming events, and even government institutions are occupied by LGBT nonsense. It is common to see crosswalks painted in the colours of the rainbow or the trans flag, usually at the taxpayers’ expense. 

It should be clear to anyone paying attention that this is far more about domination than it is about equality. ‘Gay pride’ has become ‘LGBT privilege.’ Having won the legal, political, and cultural fights, the LGBT lobby now fights for control over people’s minds. Nothing short of complete ideological conformity will do.