Pride

Shamelessness, depravity and debauchery "misgendered"

I love self-esteem. I just don’t see how one can have too much of it.

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However, when this first and most relevant definition of “pride” says “inordinate self-esteem,” I wonder...

In all honesty, when I see people displaying inordinate “self-esteem” or conceit, it has been my experience 100% of the time that such attitudes or behavior were derived not from self-esteem at all, but rather from inordinate compensation for a gaping hole vacuous of any semblance of self-esteem. In other words, they are riddled with insecurity.

But the displays of “Pride” during the month June seem to infer, more than pride, a vacuum for shame. Shame is the enemy of people in the now LGBTQIA+. They have been cloaked in shame for most of the time they discovered they were different, taken internally based on the opinions and ideas of others.

That’s a horrible way to live: to feel ashamed of oneself or feel disappointment or disregarded from one’s family or peers. It’s insufferable to feel a lack of belonging, inclusion or sense of tribe. In a push against this, many have become shameless. That’s another trait which means “to lack in shame (and pride) to an extent of disgrace.” The opposite of shame is worse than shame.

I was an outcast, harshly bullied as a young person. I have met few people who have lived through the level of bullying I was exposed to growing up. It wasn’t because I was gay, obviously not because of my excessive pigmentation, and it wasn’t on account of being part of any “marginalized communities” alleged to be prone to discrimination and bullying for which most people obsess over compensating. I was just different. I was a little too inquisitive. I wondered why people behaved the way they did and rather than guess, I had the audacity to ask them about it. I lacked social awareness. They didn’t know why they acted as they did, or they probably wouldn’t have acted in such perplexing manners. They didn’t want to think about their motivations. My asking was a kind of intrusion upon their mindless blundering. I was also skinny, extra pale (too white) and had knobby knees. None of those attributes helped matters. I was what one might objectively consider an ugly or funny looking kid, but worse than that, I was odd.

This is not the story of a cis, white girl trying to steal gay thunder. I’m actually bi. But, as far as being an outcast goes, whenever I bring up my sexuality among the LGBTQIA+, I get some kind of no true Scotsman mumbo jumbo thrown in my face, marginalizing my connection to the group who is demanding marginalization status. Apparently, liking vagina isn’t enough to qualify one as queer anymore. I’m just your run of the mill heterosexual woman who enjoys other women’s vaginas, I guess.

Not that anyone wanted to think about that. I can’t seem to make the absurdity of the LGBTQIA+ anymore illustrative than to show with all their bluster of inclusivity- particularly during pride month, who gets left out.

And I’m perfectly fine with that. I am not big on collectivism, and I’ve grown accustomed to being left out.

When I was in my ugly phase, things were hard for me. No one made it easier. No marginalized group thought to use whatever clout they had to help lift up an inquisitive, white weirdo. I was all on my own.

We had a black all student body president my senior year of high school in mostly white, mostly Republican, Orange County, California. He was athletically, scholastically and in every other way gifted. He was extremely attractive, too. Yet, at the same time, one of the gals in my gym class who was black, elevated herself in the only way she knew how. She heckled me, calling me names and making fun of how pale I was to her other black girl friends. She called me, “Hey, white girl” and it wasn’t just like she called all white girls this. I was bordering albino white, so it was a special inference for me. This was long after my main bullying phase had ended. So, she was mostly just a daily nuisance.

I could see why she did it. She was angry. I never did anything to her, but I was still the equivalent of fish in a barrel for her to shoot at. I didn’t have a lot of friends, I didn’t fit in and I was weird. She was punching down. We see people like her, and we say “it’s understandable.” Yeah, but that doesn’t make her behavior acceptable. This is maybe something that needs to be said a lot more to people making this lousy excuse for fucked up behavior.

It wasn’t like I could lash back. I tried to be extra nice to her, and that just made her more mad. I think she saw everything as a popularity contest she couldn’t win. I suspect she blamed the attitudes of others toward her skin color and gender, but with our gregarious ASB president being black, that whole narrative didn’t pan out for her. It seemed she ended up being less popular than many other kids, because she was a mean, angry bitch. She couldn’t handle having an ugly, white girl be nice to her. I was just a symbol to her of what the “white community” offered her in regards to friendship: their scraps. Of course, I didn’t offer myself to her as white people scraps. I can only see in hindsight she was living in some made-up story in her head of collectivism that kept her feeling persecuted all day long as an excuse for her to behave in an atrocious manner when someone was actually being nice to her.

The point I am getting at is that a lot of what people see as marginalization is self-perpetuated. A lot of it is just a shitty mindset seeded in self-loathing. That girl could have been the most popular girl in school if she had been kind. She was beautiful. She was one of the most beautiful women in our school. Most the popular kids by my senior year in high school were kind, and no one else’s ethnic backgrounds held them back.

The only reason I was still nice to her was because I hoped it would engender a little mercy. If I liked myself more, I would have told her to go fuck herself when she hollered out mean things to embarrass me across the main hall in front of everybody during my senior year. “Hey, white girl” she’d yell to me specifically getting everyone running between classes to stop and look at me, “here’s your perfect guy.” Then, she’d point to this red haired, red nosed, goofy looking dude who looked like Howdy Doody came to life. Her friends would all howl with laughter.

“Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll consider it.” I would say. Then, put my head down and try to get to class without anymore extra attention being brought in my general direction. I worked hard for my abuse then, because I felt like a lesser person who had to.

Thank God, I eventually stopped seeing myself that way and allowed myself to project my inner beauty, grace and love into the world. The world responded in kind. Life changing realization…

In the worst of my ugly phase, though, and this is going to be more pertinent to the topic at hand, I started to feel like there was nothing to lose and nothing to live for. So, for about a year-most of the 7th grade and the dawn of the 8th to be precise, I stopped combing my hair and brushing my teeth. I never looked in the mirror. I showered as little as once a week. I basically gave up. This obviously was not the best way to dig myself out of the pit of low self-esteem in which I felt trapped.

You might notice, none of this sounds like pride, nor does it sound like I was particularly feeling shameful. In fact, I had become what one might consider shameless. I didn’t think it mattered. I didn’t think I mattered. I was told publicly in a large crowd of fellow students that nothing I could do to change myself would matter. “If you changed your mom’s car or your clothes, your face, your body or even your name- even if you became a whole entirely different person, we still wouldn’t like you, none of us would.” Everyone listening to this rant by the most popular girl in the 8th grade of Newport Christian School laughed and nodded in agreement, acknowledging the truth of the statement. “Or her voice!” someone else chimed in. “Or her hair!” the whole school decided to hop in and make a chorus out of it. “Her eyes!” “Her shoes!” People I didn’t even know were joining. You’d think they were reaching for top answers on The Family Feud the way they carried on.

Ok, so why bother? I thought.

What’s the point of trying to look nice or present myself well if it will have no effect on the outcome? All I can do is put one foot in front of the other and go to school everyday, suffer this constant persecution and hope life outside of school gets better one day.

Luckily, my mom saw that I was struggling and got me out of that school. Although, I think it was to stop her from personally murdering half the students and the parents who created such monsters. It probably saved my life. I still carried some of my victim mindset with me through changing schools, but with each new school, it got better. People say you can’t just change schools because things aren’t going your way, but sometimes you must. Running away from my problems was one of the best things my parents ever helped me do. Here’s a tip for the “stand your ground’ anarchists out there: when your problems are your culture and you are not a cultural leader, you might have to move on.

My point is, I see the Pride scene as a reflection of how I felt when I was at my lowest. If they aren’t going to accept that we are gay, then we might as well be as gay and depraved and ridiculous as people can imagine we are and make a lark of it. They see us as just a bunch of oversexed perverts, and they will never accept us. Let’s just be that then and turn it all into a big fucking joke.

So highly erotic, fetishized niches of gay people started popping up at outdoor public marches, men wearing next to nothing, others in full black leather suits and face masks, some wearing BDSM attire only appropriate for a dungeon and other people wearing dildos wherever they could fit them. Anyone could rock a neon tutu and heels. Cross dressers and drag queens, a once rare sight outside a gay hook-up bar, burlesque performance or cabaret were out in broad daylight. Everything that was once considered fetish, private and adult was brought to light and looking for acceptance with the cis “breeder” crowd-and their children. Teaching tolerance and all that… “Everyone must love everything, and anything goes at Pride” seemed to be the evolving theme of the events. It got further and further from its initial aim of creating mutual respect and belonging. It has become more of an annual test of civilization to endure the bordering predatory nature of a traditionalist’s nightmares.

Who cares what traditionalist’s dream about? Insecure people do, and they exploit your worst for their amusement. It’s a sort of backlash at anyone and everyone regardless of whether they deserve it, to assuage their own shitty feelings of inadequacy. Remember the FB page of James Alefantes, the gay, Comet Ping Pong Pizzagate guy? It’s possible he never did anything to children directly. But he sure enjoyed joking with his friends about doing grotesque, sexual and violent stuff to other people’s kids on his public FB page. Why would that seem funny to him and his friends? Maybe, they fantasize about scaring you. Maybe, they get a kick out of it. Remember the girl in high school who picked on me?

And who gets the worst of it? Those parents that mindlessly drove their kids to a Drag Queen Story Hour out of their own self-flagellating sense of intolerance, white guilt and illegitimacy. From what I have witnessed, these are mostly obese mothers, some with liberal arts degrees who discover only by the sleuthing of concerned traditionalists that a serious convicted child predator ended up on the list of readers that day.

Are they glad to know? Of course, not. They wanted to go on believing gay people are magically safe for kids, safer than the general population. (1 in 3 kids are getting molested in America by age 18, remember?) That’s happened at not one but two of these Drag Queen Story Hour events. In the minds of the insec-queer, you and your children are likely the scraps the cis world offered to compensate them for decades of neglect from their parents and peers. They have every intention of elevating themselves on your stupidity for trusting them by making a mockery of you and yours.

What was pride supposed to be? It was initially intended to elevate morale among a marginalized group of individuals with diverse sexual preferences. It was to help create community and belonging. Yet, it keeps plummeting deeper into this big, fucked up, stupid, circus of freaks. Every year, they push harder in enlisting children into their cult of incivility. Why not? When you consider, they already think gay people are after their children anyway, might as well prove it to them.

Here’s what I want to know as a sensible, self-loving adult (and parent): where are the grown ups? Where are the gay people who love themselves, who don’t feel so low they have to take part in this shameless exercise in self-deprecation? Why aren’t they speaking out? Why do they go along with it? Why is everyone pretending like this scene is growing tolerance when it has obviously done nothing but foster a greater, more irreparable divide?

The Pride show has nothing to do with pride anymore-if it ever did. What good is pride anyway? Pride is just a feel good word, derived from people over compensating for low self-esteem. I’m not sure that’s even happening in this depraved, debauchery inundated exhibition. There is a very convenient wordsmithing aspect, not unlike that with BLM. If you say you don’t support BLM, the obvious movement and organization that entails fundraising and leadership pointed towards fostering communism through violent means, then you must hate black people or think they don’t matter. It’s entirely based on the name with full knowing they quickly evolved into so much more than their label. Likewise, with the nation state named “Israel,” if their military does something ghastly, and you speak against it, your Christianity is in question or maybe you are anti-Semitic or a neo-Nazi. So it is with Pride celebrations, if you are against what they truly are (this child grooming, self-deprecation cult), you must hate the gays or want them all to hide themselves from the world. You don’t care if they are prone to committing suicide or being outcast from society.

Where is the pragmatism? When did accepting someone is gay mean accepting people can come to an office made up like they are performing in the cast of Cats or going out for Halloween? I am daily seeing adds for “family friendly” Pride events that are obviously fetish based, adult entertainment acts that are not in any way appropriate for the attendance of minors.

As a white, “heterosexual” mother of two who also likes vaginas, I feel very much like I will be excommunicated from civilized society for bringing up the issues around “Pride” and speaking out about it.

But somebody has to say something. This isn’t pride. It’s depravity. Any queer person with self-esteem can start to create the respect they deserve by projecting inner beauty, grace and love to the world. Legions of other people who respect themselves and respect others will surround you to the point you may struggle to find alone time. At that point, when you see self-destruction festivals in the name of Pride, you won’t walk the other way. You’ll run.