“Queer community,” in my small rural town, is mostly the work of one guy. He owns the gay coffee shop. He’s on the school board—this, despite bigots from the local Catholic church specifically putting up a write-in candidate to oppose him. He organizes drag events, by which I mean he is the drag event; the last time I saw him, he was sitting on the front steps of a farmhouse in a ‘60s gown and giant bouffant, surrounded by children, like a vision of the Virgin Mary. He organizes Pride; you would not think there were enough of us to support a full month of events, but Pride gets bigger every year as word spreads and queer people from nearby small towns start attending.
I, a trans person living in the middle of nowhere, someone who spent the first two or three years of my transition lamenting the total absence of IRL queer community, can now walk out my door, down a street decorated with rainbow flags, to an event where I will see several other trans people. That’s all because of this dude, who literally never stops working. I am beginning here, with his virtuous example—I will call him Chad, because that’s definitely not his name, and I imagine he gets enough hate mail—because there’s a lesson here: “Pride,” to the extent that it exists as a real phenomenon in real life, runs on the Chads of this world. It does not run on internet discourse. Yet every June, we drown in the Discourse all the same.
Unlike a conversation, or even an argument, Discourse is pointless, endless, circular; it’s a meme before it even begins. “Kink at Pride” is a discourse. A tender youth wonders why their nice, wholesome gay Pride festival has all these perverts at it; queer people with functional long-term memories tell the kid we’re all perverts; the next year, another kid asks again. “Bi women with boyfriends” is a discourse. No one has ever benefited from a protracted inter-queer fight about bi women’s boyfriends, especially not bi women, but it happens every June. This year, it was bi women at Chappell Roan shows—apparently enough of a scandal that gays started posting “Hitler reacts” videos, as if the sheer force of our collective biphobia had propelled us back in time to 2006.
Then there is advanced discourse: the kind that leaves legends and scars. This happens when someone takes an obviously wrong point, dips it in a layer of queer-theory jargon and presents it as the latest in radical politics. One should have to be highly online to read this discourse, so online that any childhood memories of touching grass have faded and died long ago. The more niche identities and micro-labels involved, the better. Peak Pride discourse should be incomprehensible to anyone who was born before 1983 or who has spent even one day of their life doing physical labour. For instance, a heated Twitter argument about whether the word “faunic” erased lesbians and/or “associated [lesbians] with rapaciousness.” Does it? I don’t know! I would have to have heard the word “faunic” used anywhere outside of that Twitter argument to be sure! On a fine June morning last week, I awoke to a post that read, in its entirety: “‘Hawk tua ended Pride month!’ Do … do you think queer people don’t suck dick?” I have no idea what those words mean, when arranged in that order, but I know that queer people and our collective dick-sucking reputation are on the line.
Generally speaking, this discourse comes in three flavours:
#1: Queer people are actually straight. Bisexuals and trans people tend to get hit with this one on a regular basis—I myself have been deemed straight by frequent Tucker Carlson guest Glenn Greenwald, which is a relief, because I will accept literally any label that makes it less likely that Glenn Greenwald will want to have sex with me—but you’d be surprised how far you can extend the concept: Bluesky user Privateideation fondly recalled “a group of guys who looked like extras from Cruising being called ‘spiritually straight’ because their presence in public ‘forced viewers to be complicit in their performance of masculinity.’” When you really think about it, there’s nothing straighter than a group of sweaty, muscular, masculine men at a Pride event. Thanks, Discourse!
#2: Straight people are actually queer. Both Vice and WellandGood have articles devoted to the question “Can straight people be queer?,” which sounds like the sort of question I used to google when I was three feet deep in the closet, but is in fact an extremely pressing inquiry. (I guess.) On X (formerly Twitter) user SloaneFragment recalls being told that “straight cis men must be made to feel welcome” at Pride because “they might be a closeted trans woman.” Meanwhile, the rest of X is discussing whether cis women with polycystic ovarian syndrome are “transfeminine” because they take estrogen. Now: estrogen has been a widely prescribed therapy for menopause for many years, which means—if this theory holds—that a whole lot of people’s conservative grandmas have just become Trans Elders. Similarly, the real reason to be nice to “straight cis men” at Pride is that a bunch of them are trans men who’ve been on testosterone for a while. You can’t know someone’s entire life story by looking at them! That said, it’s queer praxis to accept that people are who they say they are. If someone is using the labels “straight” and/or “cis,” it’s a safe bet that they want to be treated as straight and/or cis, at least for the time being.
#3: Being queer is actually queerphobic. Bisexuals have straight privilege and trans women are trying to make lesbians date them and trans men are converting all the butches and trans-trenders are appropriating true transsexuality and the word bisexual is transphobic because it implies there are only two genders and the non-binary tenderqueers are basically cis anyway and the asexuals are faking queerness and the demisexuals are faking asexuality and the faunics are erasing the lesbians who were already being erased by trans people and that guy in the leather harness is making people think gay people are perverts and, in the end, there’s only one person who is gay enough to attend Pride this year: the person who posted the Discourse.
Here is my question to you: Are these the best Discourses we’re capable of? Isn’t there something weirder, more impenetrable, more unforgettably annoying, that we could come up with? Pride discourse has become a gay tradition, something we do to and with each other every June; conflict is a form of intimacy, and thanks to Discourse, I’ve become intimate with thousands of queer people in ways I will regret for the rest of my natural life. If we’re going to do this, why not do it big? Put some glitter on it? I’ve tapped my social circle—most of whom either declined to answer or asked to remain anonymous, for fear of the internet’s swift vengeance—and come up with these new and horrible Discourses, which you can introduce to your friends, family, social media timeline or, really, anyone you never want to speak to again:
Pride flags are inherently nationalist. In the end, aren’t we all one sexual orientation—the human sexual orientation?
Calling hot guys “Daddy” props up the heterosexual nuclear family. This is not what we meant by “fuck the patriarchy.”
“Asexuality is inherently racist because you prioritize someone of your own race (yourself).” Spoken into being by a queer who wishes to remain anonymous, the casual erasure of every single asexual person who isn’t white is only part of this—hypothetical!—discourse’s power.
The A stands for “Andrew Sullivan.” Some will tell you that the A in LGBTQIA2S+ stands for “ally,” others for “asexual,” but in truth, it stands for gay conservative race scientist Andrew Sullivan. None of the other letters want him!
Making me pay for this beer supports capitalism. No beers are free unless all beers are free, starting with this beer, in my hand, for which I will not pay.
No gays at Pride. “Those who fought at Stonewall would not want people to flaunt their sexuality in public like this,” notes comic writer and general delight Jadzia Axelrod. It’s true: We’re making us look bad. It’s time to call the whole month off.
These are the Discourses, and they are ruthless. But I have faith that they will not stand alone. Wherever queers gather, Discourse arises, each one unique as a terrible little snowflake made of rage and repressed adolescent trauma. Every round renews my faith in humanity’s potential to annoy. We will never be rid of Discourse; intra-community squabbling is the proof that we have a community, in much the same way that a full litter box is proof that you have a cat. There is no joy or togetherness without bullshit. Granted, it mostly comes down to really competent people (poor Chad) to organize the togetherness. But the bullshit is something we can all provide.
Why you can trust Xtra
