Pride 2025
After a final game of kickball, I drove right up to West Hollywood Pride. A boy I had planned to go with cancelled last-minute, and my friends left just as I arrived. So I walked through the street alone, feeling a bit shocked and lonely, up to a club: I had driven all the way up here. Might as well make the most of it.
Bodies and bodies and bodies filled the bar I walked into. I squeezed past gay men making out, almost violently, as they crashed, carefree, into the bodies of those around them. I tried for eye contact, although (knowing that I felt disoriented and alone, and that was hard to shake) I did not expect it to take, and so I found my way to the end of the bar, near the bathrooms, where the room was darker, where the population of bodies had lost its density. I waited in line for a drink, with television screens strobing overhead, filled with images of men.
Familiar images, I thought; many that I had seen before, so that I could almost name the photographer. Images, I thought, of fit men not quite naked, but suggestive, in different gear and clothing designed to keep you looking. All studio-lit, they seemed so unreal to me. The man next to me began to yell, as a man walked up to him, asking about his relationship status, and as I turned around, I took in the span crowd, no longer immersed. I saw no distinction between bodies and images in the room; that these men had so internalized these images that they had become them. “$20,” said the bartender, for the price of my drink. I paid, drank a few sips, looked around the room, and left.
I cannot, from the beginning of Pride Month, stop thinking of the suicide of a popular gay porn star on June first. I cannot stop thinking of the gays that I know, when I asked them what gay means, answered as if their lives mirrored pornography. I cannot stop thinking about the responses to the porn star’s suicide: that porn is an industry with a remarkably high suicide rate (somewhere I read: six times higher than the general population), and I think of the anti-porn campaigns in the city I live in, that I am definitively opposed to.
A few years ago, in a coffee shop run by lesbians and gays, a Christian woman sat, surrounded by her friends, the lesbian owners of the shop, and me. She complained that pornography was ruining her relationship with her boyfriend. “It’s an addiction,” she said, and I thought of my sex therapist friend who argues the opposite. Pornography, according to her, is harmful for those who watch it. And so I spoke up, “pornography plays a large role in gay culture,” I said, “it allows younger gays to recognize who they might become one day, or have a place for their desires.” One of the lesbians nodded. The Christian woman could not understand.
My memory of pride, from the point I left the bar, arranged (as memory does) the bodies of gay men into a pyramid—symbolic, pointing towards that which it cannot reach. I guess this is what happens when bodies pile together. If this is a function of culture, to point towards an immaterial image, then I wondered what happens when that culture, almost unilaterally, becomes the image it strives towards with no remainder, with a certain type of purity and literalism. A way of becoming whole.
None of these thoughts conclude, really, except that I have, somewhere, a copy of A.A. Bronson’s book House of Shame. He speaks of queer rituals, designed to heal shame, which are necessarily “pornographic” (sexual) but also healing; they incorporated sexual references in gay culture, while also placing gays in relationship to their own community and history. He wanted, somewhere else, to place younger gays in relationship to the larger world. The rituals are sex, and they are something more. No life can continue without taking a step towards that “something more.”