Student CAMP: 

This weekend I went with friends to Montreal Pride for the second year in a row. Divers/Cite is one of the largest prides in North America; it is a long week of fabulousness culminating in a parade that features lesbian moms, deaf queers, leathermen, and drag queens who will unflinchingly march a few kilometers in eight inch platforms. (This, incidentally, is why one should never mess with a drag queen. I can’t even walk five feet in heels.) It was a wonderful weekend, and I’m sure my mother will be horrified to hear that I actually marched a bit this time around. My Canadian friends invited me to join their contingent, one of the more left-leaning political parties in the country. I’m surprised I was allowed back into the country.

Last year I confess that I was extremely starry-eyed at the entire affair, as most of my other pride experiences had been significantly smaller—Boston Youth, Boston Dyke, Burlington Youth, and Delaware Pride, which for a few years there was best described as "a few gay people hanging out in Rodney Square." This year I’m afraid the cynic in me kicked in, and for those few minutes when I wasn’t girl watching (if women who look like those women date women, then the world is a beautiful place and I am happy to be in it) I began to notice the sheer commercialization of Pride.

Thinking back, I’ve never been to a Pride that wasn’t a business. The lists of corporate sponsors battling for the gay dollar is ridiculously long; now that they’ve realized that gay people apparently have money, they want us to spend it on their gay friendly beer—it’s always beer—or soda or small furry mammal or rainbow knickknack. The march this year had a tangible corporate presence that ranged from every other float being sponsored by a company to free flags being handed out—one side was rainbow, the other was a beer company logo.

I suppose on one level this is a perfect representation of the state of gay rights. Corporations might not like us very much, but they’ll take our money. I’m waiting for a beer company to come up with the slogan "Civil Rights? Not in your lifetime, so drink heavily instead!" I’m sold.

Pass the six-pack. Queers are more likely to be alcoholics anyway; no point in fighting it.

I’m told that Pride marches used to be radical and subversive acts that were a source of solidarity and visibility for the queer community. That is still true to a certain extent, yes, but I feel like pride is rapidly becoming a commercialized dance party for all the pretty people in wife beaters who look good when hosed down. I’m all for occasionally dancing all night with a few hundred lesbians, but I’m not going to suffer the illusion that doing so is an inherently political statement any more than going on a date with another woman.

Show me a civil rights movement that had corporate sponsors. "I have a dream...and you can too, if you buy a Ford." Those of us upset at the relative complicity of the population at large concerning issues ranging from the rising AIDS rate among gay men of color to the still staggering gay teen suicide rate have little left to do except cry into our rainbow flags as we light tasteful candles and listen to Enya. Given how much it seems to cost to be gay these days, what with all the paraphernalia, I think I might have to switch teams to save up some money—nobody makes straight people buy flags to hang in their windows. (Okay, maybe John Ashcroft.)

What is upsetting to me in the end is the lack of a clear sense of the political at prides these days. Politics abound, yes, but the message that there is work to be done has been drowned out by the disco beat.