"Pride" is a mess again this year. We
will have two parades. One on
Saturday on Broadway. Another
downtown pride parade on Sunday. We'll have a patchwork of festivals this year from the
popular Street Parties sponsored by Pike/Pine bars to QueerFest at Volunteer Park.
The Stranger's Eli Sanders offers
a grand vision of a Gay Pride 2010 celebration in this week's edition.
Imagine a Pride weekend with a sensible progression of events that move seamlessly from the Hill to downtown and back again, mirroring the ease with which gays now move about in this city and recognizing the community's roots, both old and new.
It's a fine vision, and Sanders offers some suggestions on how to get there.
The problem is that it isn't the lack of grand visions that has put us into the kind of mess we find ourselves in semi-regularly concerning the June commemoration of the Stonewall uprising. There have been as many grand visions than there have been parades in the past 30 years.
But we keep stumbling back into this kind of mess partly because of another aspect of things that is well demonstrated in Sanders' article.
In Sanders' view, the folks who have tried to do maintain a pride celebrations on Capitol Hill are "disgruntled supporters of 'tradition'." According to Sanders skewed view of things, they hosted a "scraggly counter-parade held on the Hill" even though the shorter Hill parade was far better organized than the truly scraggly downtown affair that stretched on for hours with more gaps than entries.
He explains to his readers why they should hold those "disgruntled supporters of 'tradition'" in comtempt:
Roughly put: Downtown Pride Parade supporters back integration; Capitol Hill Pride Parade supporters back separation. It's Mainstream Sensibility vs. Ghetto Mentality.
His article becomes yet another set-piece in that long tradition that has given us such a mess each spring as preparation for the June Stonewall commemoration unfolds into semi-public view.
Each spring, we get grand visions of the future of Pride Week accompanied by mean-spirited attacks on "the other guys" who don't share the grand vision. Each June, we muddle through a celebration that becomes -- despite the disarray -- somehow celebratory enough that most of us are willing to forget about it all for another nine months.
A big part of the problem (a problem of which Sanders' article is but a recent symptom) is that the June events have often been treated as the property of one publiclation or another. It's been that way from the start. Seattle Gay News was started by David Neth as a newsletter to promote Seattle's first gay pride celebration way back in the 70s. The paper developed awkwardly and by fits and starts into an independent voice, but has often turned back into a two-way embrace with parade organizers.
The paper's current editor, George Bakan, first introduced himself to the community as an activist working with the group that organized the parade/march and rally in the early 90s. He took over SGN during one of the lower points in its checkered history even though he himself admitted that he was more interested in activism than in journalism.
Sanders' slanted piece in this week's Stranger would appear downright fair and balanced if set against some of the articles that Bakan's SGN printed in the 90s promoting its (and Bakan's) view of what the parade should be.
As Bakan stepped aside from active involvement in the Freedom Day Committee in the later 90s, his paper set aside most of its parade activism. But SGN continued to publish the ad-heavy "Official Pride Guide" for the parade/march and rally organizer, the Freedom Day Committee.
Pride Week is Christmas-in-June for publications that cater to gay and lesbian readers. During what would normally be a slow advertising season, gay publications can pack their pages with ads from both national and local businesses hoping to attract some of the dollars spent during pride week.
Two different publications again became central in the 2005 split among parade organizers that resulted in the formation of SOAP and last year's duel parades. One of the folks who had stepped in to take over the crumbling remnants of the Freedom Day Committee was the publisher of a new monthly magazine that attempted to attract Seattle gay readers and advertisers. The magazine with no track record was given the designation "Official Pride Guide" by the proto-SOAP group that had taken control of the pride planning group. (The group wouldn't adopt the SOAP name until 2006.)
(SGN's thick Pride Week advertising supplement didn't seem to suffer from the lack of official imprimatur, however.)
Predictably, the 2005 venue change announcement
was carried as an "exclusive" by the magazine whose publisher served on the proto-SOAP board.
Sanders points out in his article that those who have attempted to maintain pride events on Capitol Hill have been "encouraged by some Capitol Hill bar owners who see downtown celebrations as a threat to their Pride weekend income." But he fails to point out that the original move to Seattle Center and to 4th Avenue was encouraged by party promoters who hoped to create downtown celebrations that would bring pride weekend income to their companies.
The proto-SOAP board included at least one party promoter who reportedly explained to some at the time that he expected the new venue to give his company and others a better way to compete for party business on pride weekend.
There are an array of competing commercial interests involved in the disarray this year as there have been in the past. Both SOAP and the Capitol Hill supporters have been entwined with those commercial interests from its start. SOAP is hardly the other-interested community-based "committee" that Sanders tries to make it in his article.
Another of the historic problems with Seattle pride celebrations has been their tendency to ignore those kinds of commercial interests. A number of folks in the 90s -- including The Stranger's current editor, Dan Savage -- tried to change the tilt of the June events to something that would be more friendly to business interests. The attempts were resisted by leftist political groups (and SGN) that maintained control of the events throughout the 90s.
It's doubtful we'll ever get to any new grand compromise about pride week until we find a way to embrace the week as both a political and commercial venture. SOAP's current round of recriminations echoed by The Stranger aren't getting us any closer to that point of compromise.
One of the ironies of the SOAP's assumption of control is that although it was an essentially commercial enterprise, it became more hostile than the old political activists had been to participation in pride planning by local gay businesses. That hostility to local businesses has characterized SOAP's short history.
It's true, as Sanders argues, that "if people in the 'leadership' of the gay community stop working at cross-purposes and try to get there, [pride celebrations] could be a great success, symbolically and financially, for all concerned." But that "leadership" has not been demonstrated this year or at anytime in its brief and sorry history by SOAP, the group endorsed by Sanders and The Stranger. They've been throwing out excuses and recriminations at those who have refused since 2005 to shut up and do what they wanted done.
We won't get beyond that this year. Maybe SOAP will manage somehow to pull off something so spectacular this year that they will finally become, along with their partners at The Stranger, the default "owners" of "Seattle Pride" making them able to finally do whatever they decide is best for "the community." Maybe.
I'm still convinced that SOAP in any form is so much the root cause for the current set of problems that there is little hope as long as that group is involved in things of getting beyond the kinds of recriminations that Sanders throws out throughout his article.
We not going to get beyond it between now and this June. We won't get beyond it if we wait again until next Spring 2008. We might get beyond the nastyness if folks without the usual baggage of self-interest take an interest in doing something about it in, say, September.
Labels: gay organization, Gay Seattle, history, Seattle, Seattle Pride
