I love a parade

Millions of straight people around the nation, and perhaps the globe, will gather in Boston at the end of the summer to celebrate a first annual Straight Pride Parade. This will entail festivities such as …

Such as … what? There are a ton of snarky answers I could give about what kind of floats the heterosexual bacchanal would include (I’m resisting the temptation to be snarky and give this stupid event any sort of sheen of fun) but I’m really wondering what this event would feature. Beyond trolling, which the organizers confirmed by hiring Milo Yiannowhatever (uninterested in Googling to check spelling) as the grand marshal, what is the point of all this?

One of the organizers says the point is straight people attaining equal rights. Equal to whom? If they’re talking equal to gay people, one of the major legal disparities is that LGBT people and others in many states can be fired for their orientation alone. Straight people cannot. So if these parade ringmasters really want to be equal to gay people in this respect, they’d actually have to take a step down.

There are many examples that one could easily cite to show why LGBT people still face discrimination and disadvantages that others do not but I will give two quick examples to illustrate who really is in a sense on the low end of this seesaw. First, last weekend at the gay pride parade in Detroit, a bunch of neo-Nazis wearing swastikas protested, called people the F-word, pissed on flags, the whole deal. Second, last year at pride in Philadelphia, some yahoos were protesting, saying “Gays should not have children” as we walked by with our son, two days after he moved in (we ignored them and continued to enjoy our day).

Neither of those two things would happen at this straight pride day. The most marchers would get is snark or cattiness from the peanut gallery. When the bottom-feeders of society protest pride like they did in Detroit, they only justify the need for LGBT people to march and celebrate and be visible.

The whole point of pride is because LGBT people were made to be ashamed for so long, and there hasn’t been an equivalent for straight people. This whole dumb parade idea is like asking, “If there’s a BET, how come there’s not a WET? How is that fair? Huh?” followed by a smirk from someone with middle-school level wisdom who assumes he’s made a rock-solid point about a “double standard” but really has much to learn.

So many people—LGBT, African-American, Irish, Puerto Rican, Italian, Polish and more—have their own institutions because they were shut out of the institutions of the dominant groups. They march and celebrate because they once had no visibility and no equality, and they want to share their culture with the world. Parades and other events are to celebrate how far we’ve come, to recognize the shoulders of giants we’re standing on, and to acknowledge how far we have to go.