Milo Yiannopoulos, Straight Pride, and Nazis
Where Detroit LGBT Pride and Boston ‘Straight Pride’ intersect
Know what the saddest sight in the world is?
Watching LGBTQ people on the subway after Pride, hurrying to remove their beads and rainbow baubles so they can make it home safe after the parade.
Manhattan, London, Southampton, Detroit. It doesn’t matter where. Men who are obviously gay, women who are lesbian or transgender — all obvious members of gender or sexual minorities are vulnerable to abuse and assault.
This is June. Pride Month.
LGBTQ people are remembering the Greenwich Village Stonewall Riots, honoring the symbolic beginnings of equality. The Riots happened because people wouldn’t leave us in peace. Gay men, lesbians, and transgender people were dancing in a private bar, behind closed doors, minding their own business, when New York City police burst in to take them to jail.
We’d had enough. “Just leave us alone,” we said. “We’re not hurting anybody. Stop bullying us.”
Remembering that night is now a June tradition as Pride events unroll in major cities worldwide. But we’re still not safe. People still refuse to let us live in peace. We still have to take our beads off so people won’t beat us up.
It doesn’t always work —
- Melania Geymonat and her partner Chris were beaten bloody on a London bus less than two weeks ago by a gang of homophobic assailants, according to the BBC. The two were hospitalized, and Geymonat was treated for a broken nose. She says she’s used to verbal confrontation on the bus if she’s out with a date, but this is the first time she’s been beaten.
- Elsewhere in the UK, a Southampton performance of the play Rotterdam was cancelled Saturday night after two actors were attacked in the street as they walked to work. Lucy Parkinson said, “The attack happened because we were embracing. There’s no mistake that this was a homophobic hate crime. It was a cowardly attack.” She had been kissing her girlfriend, Rebecca Banatvala, who is also in the play.
- My friend and fellow LGBTQ writer Fred Shirley has been randomly harassed and threatened on the streets of Bristol, one of the most progressive cities in the UK.
- This past weekend in Detroit, armed members of the The National Socialist Movement (NSM), self-described Nazis based in Florida, crashed Motor City Pride, escorted by Detroit police officers, waving swastikas and shouting homophobic insults.
The Nazis were recorded using megaphones to shout “fuck you, faggots,” at Pride participants, tearing up rainbow flags, and urinating on Israeli flags.
“[We] will be armed and counter-protesting the freaks,” wrote NSM “commander” Burt Colucci on Russian social network VK as he organized the event. “Lets put some boots on the ground!! I don’t really give a damn about op-sec or Antifa in this situation. We go in with Swastikas blazing and if people don’t like it, tough shit…”
NSM is one of the largest Nazi organizations in the US, known for “theatrical and provocative protests,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group is notable for its violent anti-Jewish rhetoric and its demand that all “non-white” Americans leave the continent, “peaceably or by force.”
We do Pride because we aren’t safe, equal or free.
Pride is celebration, memory, honor, and protest. When we come out and take to the streets in our hundreds, our thousands, or even in our millions in places like New York City, we’re celebrating a day when we can be safe together, when we can be too strong for people to randomly attack us and send us to the hospital.
We’re refusing to be ashamed, and we’re refusing to cower. We’re protesting, and we’re proclaiming our full humanity to the world as our friends, families, and allies march and cheer with us.
The old days are over! We are who we are! Free at last!
So, just imagine our surprise a few days ago when an organization calling itself Super Happy Fun America (SHFA) announced plans to mount a “Straight Pride Parade” in Boston this August.
Yawn.
OK, so it’s not that surprising. Every year certain straight and cisgender people make a fuss, objecting to LGBTQ Pride by asking why Straight Pride doesn’t exist. Every year, privileged people (because they’re always white with good jobs and health insurance) complain that they don’t have their own day to celebrate.
How tiring and how boring —
Nobody with even the most minimal sense of empathy has trouble understanding why members of a traditionally despised minority come together to protest oppression.
Super Happy Fun America is helmed by John Hugo, a former Republican candidate for the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Not very well known himself, Hugo named right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos as Straight Pride marshal — after Brad Pitt turned down the uninvited honor.
Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart News editor and outspoken Trump supporter, is a gay man and Neo Nazi sympathizer. He had this to say about the planned Straight Pride celebration in Boston:
I might technically be a sequined and perfectly coiffed friend of Dorothy’s, but I’ve spent my entire career advocating for the rights of America’s most brutally repressed identity — straight people — so I know a thing or two about discrimination. This parade is a gift to anyone, male or female, black or white — gay and transgender allies, too! — who will stand with us and celebrate the wonder and the majesty of God’s own heterosexuality.
Straight people are not repressed. Or oppressed —
White people aren’t repressed or oppressed. Straight white men enjoy remarkable privilege in the United States. They don’t have to fight for equality. They wear it as a birthright.
Did I really just have to type that? Yiannopoulos makes a living by courting controversy, so who knows what he actually believes. But I know for a fact that some straight people really and honestly don’t understand why we need LGBTQ Pride.
They really feel marginalized, I guess, but that marginalization has to be a figment of their imagination, a product of unfounded fear. No straight woman was ever beaten on a bus for hugging her husband. No straight couple was ever attacked on their way to work because they had their arms around each other.
No uni student in Bristol was ever cursed and harassed for being straight as he walked to class.
No straight or cisgender person ever had to organize a parade to commemorate a night when people fought back against being put in jail because they were dancing.
Ever.
I live in rural Michigan in a village that boasts a population of about 300. I went to breakfast this morning at the local diner. Ordered a veggie omelette with whole wheat toast and hash browns. Had to ask for real milk for my coffee because packaged creamer substitute is the only thing on the table.
I noticed some tourists sitting across the room, obviously hailing from some big city, on their way to someplace fabulous. Two almost-elderly gay men (by the looks of them) and two children. A boy of about 12 or 13 and an older teenager with cropped hair and androgynous features.
When they all stood up to leave, I noticed the older child’s sweatshirt. It said, “gENDer,” in big bright letters, in an obvious reference to non-binary or gender fluid identity.
I tried to smile and make eye contact, but the family seemed spooked by my attention. Clearly, they were wary of drawing hostile looks in an area where LGBTQ people are few and far between.
As for me, the three of them were the first clearly non-straight, non-cis people I’d encountered in more than a year. I watched them leave as I finished my omelette, wishing we had LGBTQ Pride out here in the boondocks.
You know what we don’t need? Straight Pride.
Straight people out here aren’t afraid to say hello to one another. No straight people here have to hurry up and remove baubles and beads so they don’t get beat up. Nobody has to worry that Nazis are coming to jeer them through megaphones.