Gay Pride, Telling the Truth, and Pornography
It's true that gay-pride celebrations don't really excite me
anymore. They used to. In 1971 I was one of the organizers of the
first gay-pride event--a rally--to be held in Minnesota. I
remember being terrified (we had realistic fears that we were going to
be attacked by gangs. That didn't happen, probably because we were
[outnumbered] by television camerapeople the whole time) and I
remember being intensely proud that we had all somehow gotten the
courage up to attend.
And I remember when I went to my first big gay-pride
demonstration, a march in New York. I felt I was part of an army of
lovers as we tramped down Fifth Avenue and shouted out our slogans of
revolution.
I go to at least three gay-pride events every June
now. I am often a speaker at the rallies, or I read at literary events
built into the celebration. I enjoy them. There just isn't that edge
anymore. I no longer think I'm going to lead those legions of warriors
to some political victory. Instead I become like one of my favorite
fictional characters, Franny the Queen of Provincetown. As Franny
would, I look at the crowds, and I'm perfectly happy that the boys and
girls have come as far as they have. As Franny would, I extend all my
love to the drag queens and the men in leather and the gay youth who
wear such silly clothes and the men and women who have developed their
bodies into living sculptures and now want to show them off.
Of course I can turn gay pride into
pornography. It's especially easy for me to do that in Boston. The
weather is always good for the march in Boston, I've never known it to
fail to be beautiful on that June day. I wander through the crowds of
all the young people, so many of whom have stripped down to nothing
but their shorts, and I take mental notes on all the styles of nipples
there are in this world, wanting to make sure I use each and every one
in something I write.
All of this is helped because the boys in Boston are so
pretty. They really are. They are some of the best-looking men I've
seen. I love all the Irishmen with their shaved chests and their taut
abdominal muscles, and the black men with their deep color and their
high asses, and the Chinese men with their straight hair and their
smooth skin. The list goes on. Gay life in Boston has a spectrum to
it, and in gay-pride events, the boys and girls show it off.
Whether it's Boston, Minneapolis, Portland, or
anywhere else, there is one perpetual problem. A dark shadow always
comes into the midst of this carnival, this innocent festival of
carnal togetherness. It's nothing less than an attack on the people
who come together to live it up, and it's not an attack by the
religious right. It comes from supposed leaders of the gay community
who begin to bellyache about the "irresponsibility" of some of the
participants, the way those participants "act out" stereotypes that
make it seem that gay men are too sexual or that drag queens and
leathermen are too prominent in "the community." These "leaders" get
angry that these "negative forces" are giving the press fodder to make
"the community" look bad. If we would only "behave," we would be able
to get our civil rights, they insist. If we presented ourselves as
being "stable" citizens, then their organizations would be able to
maneuver better in the political world. If we wear leather or dresses
or hardly anything at all, the "leaders" won't be able to control how
"our cause" is handled.
I want to scream. I want to yell. What the fuck
do these people think it's been all about! Why do they think those of
us who started this whole thing took the risks we took, the chances we
gambled? We didn't do it so a lot of white boys could make careers
lobbying in Congress or could assuage their own insecurity by showing
off a perfect community to their social-worker friends. We did it
because...
We did it so that drag queens could march down
Boylston Street and not get beaten up. We did it so that leathermen
and leatherwomen could spend an afternoon at the park and not feel
like freaks. We did it so young boys and girls could come to a
gathering of tens and thousands of people and could see someone who
was hot enough that the very lust they felt was reasonable
justification for coming out.
We did it so we could be honest about ourselves
and not feel ashamed. We did it because we knew that secrets are our
most deadly enemies, and telling the truth is our strongest weapon.
When I was a young boy there was a group of
girls I played with and knew quite well who were raped consistently by
their fathers. We would get together in the playground after school,
and the girls would tell their secrets. Their mothers knew what was
going on, but didn't do a thing about it. Some of the mothers actually
encouraged it; it was a way to keep the men out of their own beds. The
girls would sit there and cry, and I would sit there with them in
utter confusion, overcome by a sense of total impotence as I
wondered what the hell was going on and what I was supposed to do
about it.
I was between ten and fifteen at the time--they
were about the same age--which meant that this went on between 1955
and 1960. There were no posters in the school offering consultation
with the counselor about child abuse. There was never any discussion
about the possibility of adult exploitation of children in our polite
conversations in church about family life. When I did try to bring up
the horrifying subject to my parents, I remember a hurt and perplexed
expression on my mother's face and her telling me, with no conviction,
that any such thing was a private matter for the families to deal
with. We didn't know any options. We didn't know how to do it any
other way.
I am still in touch with some of those girls. They
are a living encyclopedia of psychiatric disorders, including intense
agoraphobia, grotesque obesity, and severe depression. There is a
hint--nothing more, nothing anyone can act on--that one of them has
perpetuated the cycle by offering up her own daughter to her
father. The grandfather is harvesting his offspring now, just as he
did over thirty years ago. None of the women will talk about what went
on when they were young. They live with the burden of the secret now,
so many years later.
I blame everyone's silence for what happened to
those girls as much as I do their fathers. I blame society for the way
it entered into a vicious conspiracy of denial.
It was because of the experiences the girls
told me about that I became sexually active myself. I was a teenage
boy, and I wanted to get laid. There were adults having sex with
children all around me, and no one was being punished. Why shouldn't I
do it, too?
I began to go into Boston. I know that young
people who are on the streets in the sexual marketplace are often at
great risk. I understand that the landscape has changed: there are
drugs that I didn't have to deal with, and there is violence that
wasn't part of my experience so long ago. I did not suffer in those
ways. In fact, I had a great time.
I was given a great deal of affection by the men I
found in the alleys off Park Square. I was guarded by a flock of black
drag queens who just loved to mother a young boy from the country. No
one let me go with any of the men who might be dangerous. I was not
allowed to go into places where there would be people using hard
drugs. I had my swarm of queens around me to make sure I went only
with the right men.
Those men assumed that any pretty blond boy like
me was out there for the money. I never asked for it, but I was
constantly given cash by my tricks. They would discreetly slip a
twenty-dollar bill into my shirt pocket, or else they would leave a
couple of tens on the bureau of the hotel room we had just used. The
money became a problem. There was little privacy in my home, and my
parents began to discover piles of cash that I couldn't account for.
So I began to get rid of it. Every week I would
find some mention of a charity or an arts organization whose work I
admired, and I would look up its address. I would take a stamped
envelope with me into the city and, when I was done with my
explorations, I would put the money in the envelope and mail it off. I
figure I gave at least $2,000 to the Museum of Fine Arts in anonymous
cash donations over the years.
But now I had a secret, and it seemed one as
powerful as the secret the girls had to keep. I was doing all the
things that could not be talked about. I was having experiences that
could not be mentioned. And, in fact, they were never mentioned
outside of the conversations I had with my bejeweled guardians of Park
Square and my traveling salemen from Connecticut. Once again there
were no invitations to drop by and discuss the issue with anyone at my
school. There wasn't a hint that this was something I could discuss
with my parents. They didn't really want to talk about sex at all, I
realized, let alone the extravagant details of the sex life I was
actually living.
I learned to live with the weight of the unspoken,
with the shame of the unmentionable.
I withdrew from that slightly open world of
sexuality when I went to college. There were darker dramas to be
played out on the midwestern campus where I went to school--alcoholic
professors who would jump me at the end of parties, college
administrators who would tell me stories about their adventures in
tearooms in the hopes that their exploits would get me into bed.
I watched the annihilation of people all around me
who were destroying themselves because of the silence. And I nearly
destroyed myself as well. I watched careers being ruined when secrets
were discovered. I watched people drop out of college because there
was no reason to finish. They would never have a career, in any
event--their secret would make sure of that.
After I graduated, I fell in love for the
first time with a man who wanted to stop hiding. My lover was one of
the handsomest men I had ever seen, and he thought the same of me. We
were princes who went out and conquered the gay world, again in
Boston, where I moved. We were taken on weekends to Cape Cod by older
gay men who wanted nothing more than to watch our young love, men who
asked for nothing more than to provide us with a clean bed and, maybe,
hear the mattress moan with our near-constant lust.
My lover committed suicide about three months into
our affair. He told me, just before he did it, that he had hoped that
falling in love would be enough, that it would make everything
okay. He told me that it hadn't worked. I was everything he wanted, he
assured me, but having everything he wanted wasn't enough to overcome
the guilt of being a queer.
It was that lover's suicide that forced me to
become an activist. There was nothing to do but to surrender the way
he had, or to change the world. It was that simple. And changing the
world didn't mean having pleasant lunches with senators, or being
invited on to prestigious talk shows, or any of that. Those are the
experiences we had that drove us to march past police lines, to
venture into worlds that no one had even told us about, and to invent
ones that hadn't existed. Changing the world meant bringing everything
out into the open and then loving it. It meant throwing your arms
around a drag queen and telling him that he was beautiful. It meant
complimenting a dyke on her motorcycle and telling her she had every
right to drive it bare-breasted at the head of the parade. It meant
sauntering up to a leatherman and giving him the eye and letting him
know that he was hot. It meant whispering to a young thing that he was
looking good.
It meant telling the truth. It meant saying that
our lives were sexy and worth living. It meant we weren't going to lie
anymore. It meant we weren't going to be part of the system of silence
and suppression that left women and men so alone that they couldn't
find a reason to go on living.
It meant dressing up and flaunting it on Boylston
Street and Fifth Avenue and Market Street and Santa Monical Boulevard
and Main Street. It meant saying to the whole world: Fuck you. In your
face. Get out of my life. Look at it and wish you had it.
That's why there's gay pride, goddamn it!
John Preston
from "My Life as a Pornographer and Other Indecent Acts", 1993