Pride/San Francisco
I just got home from San Francisco. I really love the town and I'd love to live there. It's a beautiful town, even the Tenderloin where I was staying. It's great that it's so pedestrian friendly - I walked about 50 miles over the last three days. I just didn't have the motivation to take a crash course in SF public transit. I got to hang out with some friends I wanted to see, and it was a real treat that Kevin got to visit.
Pride weekend was interesting. On Friday I went to the trans fest/march in Dolores Park. Saturday I stayed in and only caught the tail end of the street fair, but I was in the Castro in the evening where I saw a lot of people from Santa Cruz on the street. I also saw a public display of oral sex in the window of an apartment.
I won't get into too many details about pride, but overall it reinforced my disenchantment with the gay community. This lies in the severe fragmentation of the gay community which is rooted in fetishism. Dykes on bikes, leather pigs, twinks, etc. - it seems that the majority, definitely not the minority, of people there fit into discrete identity brackets and in completely segregated peer groups. It's apparent that this identity obsession is sexually motivated - people are making a comprehensive lifestyle out of fetishism. Maybe I'm overgeneralizing, but these people just seemed like vapid sex fiends (whether hiding it or not) incapable of real human companionship.
That was a really condensed rant and I'm just babbling. If that was completely incoherent, chalk it up to too much time on the road in the heat.
posted by sausagequeen @ 12:07 AM
4 Comments:
I think for lesbians it's less about fetishes than it's about other interests: either bikes and the butch/femme scene, or else angsy writters filled with drama who frequent coffee places. Like that play Ron and Kevin as I saw for Caitlyn. It's equally frustrating for me, since I won't buy into the drama and don't know which coffee places are typically "lesbian".
I'm not saying that Pride itself is promoting sex sex sex, and I'm not sure that fetishism is the right word.
Pride is a celebration of the queer experience. The spectators, however, are where my frustrations are rooted. What I was trying to get at is that is simply this: people in the community are image obsessed because of sexually motivated reasons. "I am going to make a characature of how I want to portray myself in order to attract a certain type of person to have sex with. I'm going to have friends that are the exact same way as me and look for the same things as me." It just creates a huge barrier to real human contact and makes me feel really sorry for these people.
Another thing - when I was taking a taxi out of the Castro on Saturday night the cab driver was really nice and asking us about pride. He said that in the morning he and his wife went to Dolores Park for the lesbian fest/march. A woman approached him and said "you're breeders and you don't belong here." How fucked up is that.
Regarding the sex obsessed culture, I agree, but my most profound feelings of the event revoled around the overwhelming numbers of people and the amazing show of support for the GLBT community. I've never seen anything like that before.
Oh definitely - the support of the queer community wasn't astounding. My reflections weren't about Pride itself, but about the gay community in general. Nobody grabbed my ass or drunkenly attempted to sexually assault me at pride.
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