pride. le sigh.

i feel like a bad queer today. pride has come and gone and i did *nothing* to celebrate. in fact, i spent my saturday night with my queer-friendly straight friends playing rock band until the wee hours of the morning. i finally got to screech celebrity skin into a microphone with my friends on various back-up instruments. it was super sweet.

i don't know why i can't get behind pride anymore. i could say it's the commercialization of it, which it is somewhat. being in minneapolis during pride, the city that houses the headquarters of target, it's a little bit vomitous to see homos walking around with temporary rainbow tattoos with big target emblems in the middle. but that's not it entirely. my friends all went out last night, had a big gay time, and i'm sure i would've had a blast if i was with them. i just couldn't bring myself to do it though.

maybe it's the way that pride turns into a binge drinking fest, which i have no issue with necessarily except for when it's binge drinking done by a bunch of frat boy dykes with visors that make me want diiiiiieeee. popped collars, polo sport, and the who-has-a-better-6-pack contest amongst them is just so not appealing.

maybe i'm too old for this. but i'm only 26. should i really be this over it? i blame college. four years at a women's college where all we did was drink and buy into this gross fetishistic culture of talking about tits and bacardi 151. i wasn't even butch then or sporty or whatever...i was femme, but not out as femme because there wasn't any kind of space for that there. four years worth of all that grimey, sweaty, woo-hoo "pride" shit that has made me feel sour about it since.

but don't get me wrong either. i've been to prides all over the place, in various cities, since college and have enjoyed myself. nyc pride is fantastic and there's no way to not have fun there, whereas d.c. was just plain ol' underwhelming. i don't know what it is, but even my fonder memories of summers spent partying in the streets with a bunch of queers, covered in rainbows, and drinking margaritas smuggled in in nalgene bottles can't get me amped about it now.

i guess what makes me feel guilty, when i really think about it, is that as a femme, i recognize that i get away with a lot. i walk down the street and what i get noticed for or heckled for is almost never my gender or perceived sexuality. i'm read as a straight girl unless i'm arm-in-arm with some handsome boi type. and so i know that, in the spirit of pride which, lest we forget with all that beer and all of those tits, that what we're celebrating when we do pride is that queers exist and that we can organize and form mass and can be political and powerful. this is, after all, our remembering of stonewall, right? so i feel this obligation as someone who passes as straight 99% of the time to stand-up and state my queerness and my desire and to challenge people's assumptions that yes, queer can come in a body that wears red lipstick and dresses. here i am, come and count me. but even with all that on my mind, i couldn't get myself to the parade, to the various marches (including the trans march, which is way smaller, not commercialized, and struggles with visibility every year), or even to the afterparty at our local queer watering hole.

i want to be excited about pride again or maybe not even "pride" but just queerness in general. i want to take it back from its sponsors and i want it to feel inclusive and fun and political. i want margaritas and middle-of-the-street dance parties, and making out at random, but i want powerful protest signs and memory behind that too. acknowledgment of a history of queers that kind of gets lost somehwere for me in all that is "pride" currently.