Somewhere Over the Rainstorm
Last year, Adidas collaborated with the Olympic gold medalist Tom Daley in a campaign celebrating the Pride Month, as one of numerous worldwide brands to do so. Apart from Daley, the company also included the actress and trans activist Jari Jones into the promotion of their limited new collection designed by Kris Andrew Small. I’ve been to the Pride in Berlin, bursting with positive energy and celebratory enthusiasm. Few places in Europe truly feel like a safe heaven for gay people like Berlin. I’d dare to say it may have the biggest online dating pool in continental Europe. You won’t be starving for sex here either and the air almost smells like poppers.
When you take a closer look at this grand celebration of queer culture, there’s a gloomier picture hiding behind the rainbow curtain, making the whole affair look like a massive PR exercise in product placement using the LGBT bandwagon as the easiest way to drain your wallet. And I do get it, it’s all about business and business is all about profit. Sometimes you have to get into bed with the devil to make a billion or two, like their infamous Yeezy collab with Kanye West that turned into an epic fail after his antisemitic rants. Now they’re stuck with products no one wants because they tainted the brand. But Daley will hardly give them any headaches.
Queer people don’t want to boost consumerism but human rights. They’re not ideological tokens that will convince you you’re a good person for wearing their colors instead of hurling insults at people that don’t share your own affinities. It merely means you didn’t get your education from a podcast and that you weren’t raised in a cave. Queer culture is increasingly growing into a lucrative brand trying to sell you everything you can think of with. It boasts egalitarianism which is just an appropriation of a cause that has come a long way from Stonewall to the flag poles on Capitol Hill.
Do they really believe we don’t see that it’s not all about expanding their customer base? Hugo Boss is also tagging along for the pride ride, their logo changed colors. Before we applaud in unison, we should remember that in the past, these self-professed allies of our community had German Nazis on their customer list. Those certainly didn’t feel the same way about sexual minorities when they locked them up in places like Auschwitz. But hey, don’t sweat the small stuff, so the saying goes.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Coco Chanel, the queen of French fashion and mother of the little black dress, turned out to be a homophobic antisemite and a spy after the declassification of European Wold War II archives. In fact, the fashion icon was so nasty that she lived for free at the Ritz Hotel in her famous suite originally meant for guests of German occupators. In the end, it was Winston Churchill himself who saved her from a trial for high treason and quite possibly, the gallows too. However, inclusion crusaders from Hollywood strut their double C’s everywhere.
For me, Pride lost its point once it became a tourist attraction and a street party. The community needs visibility where it matters, in places that decide on your right for adoption, marriage or education. Justice for minorities isn’t found in shop windows and fashion magazines. Things that matter rarely look good in glossy editorials and there’s no filter that can make Tucker Carlson look like a makeover success in Queer Eye. I wonder what that would look like but there are certain things you can’t unsee once you’ve been exposed to them. So I’d prefer to skip on it.
You don’t need a first-hand experience with homophobia to know how it feels to be a target and I’m not referring to the store. To be a target at Target you’d need a hostage situation in the fresh produce isle. Call me old-fashioned but I’d rather be stuck in the booze section. The ultimate goal shouldn’t be visibility because it’s only once we take off the feather boas, jockstraps and wigs that we go back to how the mirror usually sees you. A little bit like with the new feminists, they’re reinventing the wheel and going back to the American 1970s.
If the party is getting bigger every year, it means it’s culturally misplaced. When we look at all the media coverage, it’s mostly about places that already have a queer-friendly atmosphere, usually in the developed countries of the fabled West. Now imagine a situation when a gay kid looks at photos of the saturnalia in Barcelona, Los Angeles or Berlin. Suddenly, the camera zooms out and in his window we see the landscape of a small town where the closest thing to diversity is a Whopperito at Burger King.
These are places where minorities need the biggest support, where the closest guy on your dating app is too far to be in the next door category. Enchanted with the drive to embrace or downright appropriate them, we turn every celebration like this into an opportunity to re-affirm devotion to their cause and using their stage for our own spotlight. This is not the point of the whole thing and yet it doesn’t seem the PR departments are getting the message. Don’t let it kill your mojo- it isn’t about pronouns anyway.
If we don’t reach out to people in places you won’t see on Instagram, all the wild festivities in the shining global hubs of uncontrollable fornication will be useless. Watching a livestream of the Oscars doesn’t match the experience of sitting in the audience at the Kodak Theatre. In the same way, dating apps might have improved the ability to meet the like-minded. But you can’t livestream a working relationship. Anyone who’s ever done long distance knows that it comes with a limited emotional warranty.
Morgan Freeman expressed frustration with the idea of Black history month. According to him, African American heritage can’t be conveniently squeezed into a timetable, between others that also require wearing a ribbon. In America, the calendar is dotted with months dedicated to various causes as an excuse to pump tons of money into marketing for new products, services or projects. Unfortunately, wearing a mail-order rainbow ribbon is the closest a closeted smalltown kid is going to get to the action. That has to change and we have the tools for it.
Even in the deepest back pockets of the world, there are streetlights. Global village should be the preferred pronoun of a society that has found a previously unthinkable ways to connect. Still, the internet has reiterated that the only way for a mountain hut to catch a glimpse of the city is down an avalanche. It might be a good idea to treat Pride Month as a traveling circus spreading the joy to the excluded. No need for a riot. Just show up and put them on your map. Acknowledgment is, in my humble opinion at least, the first step on the path to love. And without it, there won’t be anything left to be proud of.
