“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 ↩︎
GOOD！
Dunno Pride still seems like the wrong word for what is Hello!
The first National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Washington, D.C (1979), and the first I ever attended, was a revelation, one, alas, not to be repeated. Today we call the rallies, parties, and marches “Pride,” as if we were kindergarten teachers working with shy five-year-olds. Well, some of us are opting out of “Pride” in Columbus, Ohio, in 2026. As leftist, feminist, longtime Democrats and sex realists, we wouldn’t be welcome anyway. So, we will miss out on witnessing the spectacle of transactivists, drag performers, and gender identity ideologists romping around at what was once a celebration of strength, resilience, and insistent demand for civil rights.
Adult social and some political groups in the area will be represented, as well as organizations in the business of affirming children as young as twelve in the mistaken belief that they can change sex, encouraging medicalization and body mutilation. While homophobia and lies are pushed on the kids, participants will be treated to the antics of the ubiquitous drag queens presenting their mocking, insulting, heavily exaggerated stereotyped versions of women. What fun!
Although there will be a few female sex mimics from the TQ plus contingent, most participants will be men claiming to be women, but both groups will harmoniously parade their “authentic selves,” their new and improved altered bodies, as they predict the coming “genocide” ( Yes, that’s the term, they use). But all are doing their best to decimate the remaining sex-based rights of women; to divide the Democratic Party; and to force us to focus on changing rooms, athletics, shelters, and prisons instead of working to stop reactionary forces in this state and country affecting truly marginalized groups.
Columbus Pride will be reverently covered by Buckeye Flame, the LGBTQI, etc., online news source that claims to speak for all Ohio LGBT etc., residents. It does not. The gatekeeper/ editor prioritizes transgender issues and refuses to print articles or stories critical of regressive gender ideology. Because of course gender-critical people calling out “transwomen” as what they are (men) is to identify them as TRANSPHOBIC.
Don’t expect any dissidents from Stonewall: it’s all in, rejecting gender-critical feminists and ignoring the needs and views of detransitioners. They too parrot the party line, one that kept Sherrod Brown out of office and might do so again. Will he wise up that most people want to see girls compete against girls, children and women safe in single-sex spaces, sex mimicking men out of women’s prisons, and some spaces (shelters, changing rooms, etc.) restricted to girls and women.
So back to the fifties and to rigid sex roles, and, for some, back to the closet. Same-sex attraction is denigrated and same-gender attraction is elevated, erasing lesbians and gays. Gone is collective action. Now it is individual solutions requiring change in pronouns, as well as surgical and pharmaceutical interventions for adults and children that are the norm. The community fervor after the assassination of Harvey Milk generated the 1979 marchers in D.C., who at that time presented a five-point platform to end discrimination. And today in the US and in Columbus? It’s about trans flags, promoting “queerdom,” and “transing” kids, finding corporate sponsors (Morgan Stanley, really?) for floats, enormous purple wigs on men parodying women, and other nonsense. No thanks.