This was my first year working for Savannah Pride, a local non-profit that organises the annual Pride Festival in Forsyth Park. On the day of the festival, I guarded a fence in the back so no one hopped it.
It's still a little hard for me to believe Savannah has a Pride event. Pride, to me, is energy and sex. Savannah is a sleepy, conservative town on Georgia's coast — old buildings, cobblestone streets, oak trees, and statues of Confederate soldiers. It's not as bad as the rest of Georgia, but not exactly a queer haven. As a port city, Savannah is culturally diverse, and with a large art college here (the one I attend), the town has modernized, with chic restaurants and shops and a growing international student population. A unique array of people compose its history — pirates, Jews, hustlers, queers, and trans folks.
Time moves slowly here. You strike up conversations on the street. We pour cocktails just after lunch.
Our Pride isn't the loud, corporate spectacle of larger cities — it's a local artisan fair with booths and vendors and a small stage where local musicians play. There's no parade, no march, no sex. But it's nice. Now that it's over and I can reflect on it, I am glad to have been a part of something, glad to have helped. I'll confess that I was, in the beginning, wary of getting involved. I know the drama that small-town gays like to get into and I wanted to avoid all that.
Many friends here have criticized Savannah Pride for putting up a fence and charging admission. In planning meetings, I learned how much it costs to throw this event — to rent chairs, pay security, print fliers, hire performers, cover their travel costs, pay for their hotel rooms, and on and on. I saw why the admission fee is necessary to make it happen. I tried to explain this to people every time I heard them grumble about it, which was often. But in the months leading up to the festival, another conversation began taking place between me and my friends: Was a Pride celebration still necessary?
I could not answer that at first. What did Pride mean to me? Did the spectacle reflect my personal experience with my sexuality? Was my life embodied by rainbows and drag shows? I went to college the year Grindr hit the app store and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed. For four years, I’ve watched country after country across the world legalize same-sex marriage. Since moving to Savannah, a steadily progressive climate is all I have known. Most of us believe it's just a matter of time before same-sex marriage is legal in the United States.
All this seemed impossible five years ago, so I can't imagine how gay elders must feel — people who lived through the darkest days of AIDS and now see LGBT characters on mainstream television. Did all this happen too quickly or not quickly enough? What is our future?
I grew up on a farm and my parents worked hard to keep the outside world away from me and my sister, perhaps hoping the gay impulse would fail to develop if left unaided by influence. Dad selected the TV channels we purchased and installed a blocker on our internet that blocked gay sites. I went to college knowing nothing about gay life.
In 2010, as a freshman at university, I didn’t know how to have safe sex. I didn't know about Stonewall or Gay Rights. I didn't know my cultural heritage. I had no idea what a drag queen was. I didn't know gay sex roles or how to use a condom. I didn't even know gay people existed outside large metropolitan areas like New York and San Francisco. I had no idea they'd be everywhere once I got to college. I came into the modern queer world with the mentality of 1978 and it was a painful adjustment to learn just how behind I was.
Pride festivals began as a movement in New York City with the riots at the Stonewall Bar in Greenwich Village. Since then, Pride events have spread across the globe. During my first two years of college, many of my peers, guys in their twenties who grew up surrounded by messages of tolerance and queer liberation (and came from larger cities) simply rolled their eyes when the festival came around.
“Why do gays have to remind everyone that they exist?" they said. I did not grow up as they did and Pride was a big deal to me. But I wanted to belong and tried to see the event through their eyes. "We don’t need pride festivals anymore,” they said. “They just reinforce the fact that we’re different and need to show off." And yeah, it did seem a little gaudy. As more states passed same-sex marriage and more queer representation was seen every year in media, it seemed, for all purposes, like we had won. What more was there to win? We had won public opinion. History was tilting in our favor.
Then I was schooled by Mark, the president of the Savannah Pride organization. "Things may be okay now," he said, "but they can always change. And don't trust appearances. Last year a local gay man got gay-bashed by tourists. The doctors had to rewire his jaw."
He and I talked about the state of LGBTQ people in homophobic countries — in Russia, parts of Africa, and even in progressive capitals like London and New York. Violence was still common. And then I began, at last, to recognize the violence of my upbringing — the true ramifications of censorship. Regardless if it was done out of love or religious fervor, it still hurt me. It made me ill-prepared for life on my own. I made unsafe sexual decisions and faced their consequences. My parents deliberately set me up for failure as a gay man.
And compared to others, I had it easy. In the years I've been in school, I've heard horror stories from other queers in the South who were beaten, abandoned, and subjected to so-called "conversion therapy." In response to all that, Pride is not a localized event. It does not exist to celebrate the progress of a single place. Rather, it exists to celebrate the idea of progress even — and especially — in places where that idea is still taking root, still coming around. Pride challenges the places where progress has not yet happened. It is the antithesis of hate and a beacon of hope to those still in the closet, who are growing up and discovering themselves in homes like the one I grew up in.
"Gay people from Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina, they come to Savannah on Pride weekend," Mark said. "They don't always buy tickets or come in, sometimes they just walk around the outside, but they see us. They know that we are here."
After working for the organization, I disagree with my peers. My pre-college life is why Pride must happen — because visibility is more than spectacle. It's a light in the dark. It saves people. If it needs an admission price to happen then it's worth every dollar.
Love, Beastly
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