“The poison was shame, and the antidote is pride.” — Craig Shoemaker, talking about the first Pride March1
I sometimes wonder if a few generations of lesbians achieved Craig Shoemaker’s vision of living without shame. Perhaps it was possible for girls who grew up after the first Pride March in 1970, but before “gender identity” declared same-sex attraction a form of bigotry, redefined lesbianism to include men, and fractured our community. Born with McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare that drove lesbians and gay men out of public life, my generation grew up in an America that enforced conformity with shame. Young people today are being shaped by a similar society.
By the time I was 13, I understood where my affections lay. I was still years from saying it aloud (though it didn’t take a genius to figure it out) when a classmate burst into a group of us talking before school. (The names here are changed. It’s my story, but not only mine.) Elle’s family had gone out to dinner the night before, and Elle had seen one of our teachers — a witty and very well-liked woman in her 30s — on a date! Not with a man, she went on, but “with a woman in a suit and tie!” My face went hot with secrecy and shame before I realized that my friends’ embarrassed silence wasn’t for Miss Ross, much less for me, but for Elle, for sharing something that was none of our business.
At a reunion decades later, in a light-hearted conversation that had nothing to do with that day, I admitted to one of those friends that it had taken me forever to learn that beauty and goodness were different things. My friend laughed and said, “Oh, I learned that from Elle.” (She’s still beautiful.) And that’s not the last twist of the story: Elle’s older sister grew up to be a prominent lesbian activist.
I no longer imagine I had any idea what was going on in Elle’s mind almost 60 years ago. For me now, the story represents a pattern that repeats like a fractal in my life and perhaps other lesbians’ lives — moments of shame and people who redeem them.
Here are a few things my generation of girls was lucky to experience: Wonderful role models in the many smart, independent, happy, never-married women who taught school then, when other opportunities for women were severely limited. Time and privacy to grow into our emotions and attachments at our own pace, without a curriculum. Single-sex organizations like the Girl Scouts. And by the time we were in college or the workforce, a rising feminist movement that centered women.
Here’s the experience of too many girls today: The Genderbread Man. Sexuality and gender flags. Classroom graphics that assign everyone a place on a spectrum of masculine and feminine stereotypes. Authority figures and institutions, including formerly lesbian- and gay-rights organizations, that encourage young people to stunt their physical, sexual, and intellectual development with opposite-sex hormones. A “feminism” that pretends to believe men can become women.
Early Pride marches stood, not for the homophobia and misogyny of “gender identity,” but for the rights of lesbians and gay men to live openly without shame. This June, I want to be part of redeeming that idea. I want to rail a little less about Pride’s corporatism and raunch, and think more about what young women need to see and hear from us in order to understand that they’re perfect exactly as they are.
Readers’ comments are always welcome — this month more than ever! Please share your ideas, here and on WDI USA’s social media.
Holly Stewart
WDI USA board
- From the transcript of an interview Craig Shoemaker gave Helen Zaltzman in 2015. The full passage is:
CS: We had a committee to commemorate the Stonewall riots. We were going to create a number of events the same weekend as the march to bring in people out of town, and wanted to unite the events under a label. First thought was “Gay Power.” I didn’t like that, so proposed gay pride.
There’s very little chance for people in the world to have power. People did not have power then; even now, we only have some. But anyone can have pride in themselves, and that would make them happier as people, and produce the movement likely to produce change.
HZ: But the word pride carries negative connotations too, of conceit or vanity — after all, pride is one of the seven deadly sins.
CS: Oh, no. Not that kind of pridefulness; more like self-esteem. That was hackneyed even then. The poison was shame, and the antidote is pride. I understood that, and the Committee understood also, because they immediately voted to make it Gay Pride Weekend.
https://www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/pride ↩︎
