Discussion Main / PrideParade

This description wants to be a Useful Notes. It should apply to the trope as it exists in fiction, not Real Life. All the social commentary is unwelcome and is leading to these edit wars. Chop it.

Done. I'm sure the Useful Notes section will keep growing over time.

I put the last two paragraphs back in because they do pertain to fiction. The Useful Notes page has all the other details.

Meh, all the paragraphs was relevant to fiction - that's why they was added in the first place. Lets keep the main page brief, now that we have the useful notes page. I moved those two paragraphs back to useful notes, keeping a brief new paragraph on pride festivals - including a few links to tropes relevant for seminars and social events at such a festival.

Leave the description of this trope short and sweet, please. I do not want to have to lock it.

Okay, DD. You storm in here and use the old tired bigotry mentioned above as if it was a valid argument, trying to remove all reference to a particular minority group and then trying to enforce your campaign by edit war. Not cool.

You claim that the minority in question (sadomasochists, in this particular case) is not included in the pride parades of the cities you have visited. While this might be true, your word for it is worthless: Only hours earlier, you claimed that they can't count as included unless they are doing "explicit acts" in the parade itself. Of course, with your bigoted definition, homosexuals can't logically be considered to be included either. This is a huge Double Standard of yours, but I guess you fail to see that.

In the cities where I participate in pride week, there are always groups and individual activists who focus primarily on BDSM, and the major activist leagues are supporting sadomasochists just like they are are supporting homosexuals. It wouldn't surprise me if this happens in your cities as well, only that you don't see it.

Edit: Removed a brief reference to previous mail conversation - expressing a lack of interest in a personal fact I misremembered as him having mentioned in a public debate, but now remember that it was in a private mail. My apologies.

Oh, and two smaller issues:

1. Wikipedia primarily use the LGBT/LGBTQ rather than BLBTQ/GLBT. So should we. 2. You argue that we shouldn't use a line of text in the hottip to explain the inclusiveness of LGBTQ. Because it gets too long, heh. Very well, I'll let this one slide for now. However, your manipulating the text to limit the definition of LBTQ to mean really LGBT only, that is not okay.

Edit: clarification removed for the thing edited out above.

One final word. The description is currently better than it was when this thing started. Lets keep it this way, and this has been a good thing on the whole. All well that ends well, and all that.

Oh Xzenu, how I long for the day you can have discussion without being rude, accusatory, and twisting my words. Not once did I say anything about what I've done sexually in this whole discussion/edit war, so I don't know where that even came from. And the point I was making about BDSM is that it is a sex act, not a sexuality. Yes it's a sexual minority, but one is about who you love while the other is how you love. Apples and oranges. If a fetish group is marching in a pride parade, they're there because they're a GLBTQ-welcoming group. It's no different than a gay-positive church or student GSA. It's part of the bigger picture.

Heh. Maybe if you have started out on a quite different footing than your original "Think of the Children!" nonsense with accusations of "explicit acts"?

Your personal insults are not the least bit impressive either. This is the second time today you imply that the only possible reason why someone might dislike your attitude must be that the person is somehow mentally disturbed. Quite an ego you have there. Take your fake longing elsewhere, and TRY to understand instead.

Even then, your existentialistic party line is old and tired. Seriously, I got fed up with that stuff like 15 years ago. People with a streamlined heterosexual or homosexual identity are so much more REAL and valuable than everyone else, blaha blaha blaha. It's nonsense. Newsflash: Having a male or female body and or/gender identity is not who you are: It's just two of the many traits that make you who you are.

Likewise, your claims that BDSM (or fetishism) must be about and only about sexual ACTS, that's extremely selfrighteous and degrading against a lot of people. For many, it's a part of the identity and / or personality, and just like gender it is some of the factors that are relevant when people fall in love. What you are doing here would have been EXACTLY the same thing as those conservatives that declare that only heterosexuality can be about love or who you are, while homosexuality is only something you do out of shallow lust. Would have been, if it wasn't for the fact that you at least use the word love. Except that you use it in such an awkward way that it sounds as if you are referring only to "lovemaking". That is, back to the sexual acts, back to square one. Bleah.

Finally, there is a grotesque selfimportance common in parts of the gay movement. To them, the rainbow flag has only one color, and no matter how many letters are added to the initialism there's really only one letter. A collective It's All About Me, where pride parades could not possibly be minorities marching together one for all and all for one. No, it's only all for one: All for the mainstream gay male - everyone else who participate should know their place and not believe that they participate for themselves. Nope, they are all marching only for the mainstream gay male, who should assert his superiority by reminding them of their place. That he is real and they are not. He has a REAL orientation, they only have "sexual acts" better kept in the closet, eh, bedroom. He should have rights, they should accept being second class citizens.

You didn't make that system. But I'm sure it feels good to accept the role as the more valuable kind of person. Oh and for the record. If you do take a more inclusive and open-minded approach, it's not some kind of gift that anyone owe you any debt of gratitude for. Just so you know.

In the meantime, the pride movement keep struggling. Externally against aggressive bigotry, internally against this kind of &%¤#. Again, I grew tired of this essensialism and hetero-homo false dichotomy like 15 years ago - so don't take my annoyment with your agenda too personally. :-)

Finally, no. There are no apples and oranges. Only fruit. All loving relationships are equally valid, and has the same moral right to be taken seriously and not be discriminated or belittled. If a certain parameter is THE parameter for you, have fun with that. But don't you dare push it on everyone else.

Wow that was patronizing, and your baggage is showing. Let's break this down:

1. If 2 guys or 2 girls are a couple, we're not necessarily privy to anything about their sex lives other than the fact that they're attracted to the same gender. This is not or should not be any more revealing than a straight person introducing their partner. But person or couple of any persuasion who says they're into BDSM is—by definition—bringing us into their bedroom, which can be Too Much Information depending on the context. My straight boss can talk about his wife all he wants; he can talk about his kids that I can assume he sired through intercourse. But I don't need or want to know about his specific fetishes. That's the difference between sexuality and sex acts.

2. At no point did I say or imply that the glbtq community is a boys-only club. Whether or not gay men really are overrepresented is a complicated matter. Either way, please stop putting words in my mouth.

3. When I was pointing out that the parades and festivals in many cities have been desexualized lately to attract families, I didn't say it should be that way (or that it shouldn't). Only that it is. It's clear that your beef isn't with me, but the way these things are run. This wiki is not the place for your personal rants. You don't have to agree with the lack of bdsm-inclusion in these events (even ignoring that fetishism and bdsm tend to have their own event weekends), but this isn't your soapbox, so stick to what IS when describing real life events, not what you think it should be.

Thanks for breaking it down. Regarding your four points:

0. Pot. Kettle. Black. Have a nice day. :-)

So, your latest strategy is to redefine "experience" to "baggage". Meh, that's cheap.

1. The only real difference here is that a gay person who isn't single is automatically outed by using personal pronouns or showing a photo where the partner's gender is discernible. This difference isn't as big as you may think. A few examples follow below, using the word in a reasonably inclusive way here - not your creepy attempt to tag YET another word as exclusive for your hetero-homo false dichotomy.

• A. Regardless of your sexuality, when you look for a partner, you want to find someone compatible. That mean you need to know the relevant parameters. Far from all people have gender as even one of these parameters, and hardly anyone have it as the only parameter. The mindset of "It's your duty to stay in the closet,a nd if you don't then it's your own darn fault if you get harassed" is thus very oppressive.
• B. One of my female friends left her jerkass ex husband for another woman. The ex found did some anonymous cyber-stalking and found out that she's having a dominance relationship with her new girlfriend. He proceed to out them to friends, coworkers, family, school and authorities, and he tries to convince social services to give him full custody of the children (preferably without even giving her visitation right). The creep didn't even dislike BDSM, it's simply that he found it a convenient weapon to use against her. Luckily, social services took her side. She did lose a few friends, but she didn't get fired.
• C. A major anti-discrimination organization explained that the above is okay. It's legal to out someone as being into BDSM (or pretending that someone is into BDSM) in order to get them fired. It's even legal to fire someone for being into BDSM, even though the personal life has nothing to do with work and the person didn't even volunteer the information. And so on. Because the laws against discrimination is strictly limited to homosexuality (and heterosexuality, lol).
• D. One legal case I followed... A woman visit a man for a BDSM date over a weekend. During or after this weekend, things go out of hand. Eventually, a friend of a friend go to the police about the whole thing. In the first legal round, the man and the woman both claim that it was consensual, but the ADA goes on about how the victim is a stupid bitch who shouldn't be taken seriously. Sure it was consensual, but the guy should be convicted anyway, because BDSM shouldn't be legal. (Well, the woman wasn't there. The defense read a letter from her, where she took the defendant's side. The prosecution did not object.) The verdict was "not guilty", based on consent. The ADA appealed to a higher court, they had second round last week. This time I didn't attend the court. But I was told the woman has now changed her story and say that it was rape. However, the ADA still insist that the court should rule that consent is not possible.

2. Like I said repeatedly, this is not about you. I'm talking about social structures here.

Again, don't take this personally. I strongly dislike the discourse you are using, but it's not like I think you invented it or anything. I do think you ought to move on to a wider perspective on sexuality and identity politics, but that's just my two cents. Take it or leave it. :-)

3. The desexualization argument you are making now is very different from your original point - and irrelevant for the argument you was making then. Also, like I have pointed out repeatedly, it's creepy and bigoted to claim that a minority can by definition not be included unless people are doing "explicit acts" in the parade. Most importantly, it's simply wrong. The last pride parade I was in (Stockholm, like a month ago) had several activist groups that are pro-BDSM/Fetishism and also several social clubs for BDSM/fetischism. (I know the same thing goes for the previous parade, Gothenburg a few months earlier, although I didn't walk in the actual parade that time because I was busy directing traffic away from the parade's path.) I know the activist groups didn't do any "explicit acts" in the parade, and I don't think the clubs did either. You know what? Their participation was still valid.

Also, the description should of course bring up diversity and variation. You are not the center of the universe, and neither is your hometown. Like I have pointed out repeatedly, different countries and cities do this differently. Judging from your description, your cities are now where my cities was 10 years ago or so, with gay superiority activists successfully making the same arguments that you make now and far worse. We moved past that stage many years ago, I honestly haven't heard your kind of discourse in many years.

Your city may or may not draw the line at LGBT, but the line is drawn differently in different countries and cities. Claiming as some kind of universal fact that the line is drawn at LGBT is sinply wrong, in both directions: Some places draw the line at homosexuality, period, while others include fetishism and sadomasochism. And with "include", I mean as part of what the pride movement is fighting for, NOT the creepy "Homosexuality/LGBT is the only one that counts, but we are so open-minded that we will let you tag along and show the world that YOU support US".

I'm not going to comment on the rape case because you left out way too many important details for me to know what's going on, but as for your friend's divorce, the courts took her side and put her ex in his place for being the jerkass he is. Just saying, that doesn't support your argument.

And I never said anybody was doing sex acts in the parade, just describing the difference between sexuality and sexual interest. Again with the words in my mouth.

But anyway, what you're describing as "creepy," I simply see as "tomayto/tomahto." Cultural dissonance? Maybe, but from what I gather in your post, it all depends on the city/country. There's no International Pride Council that decides who and what gets represented, it just depends on how each city decides to do things. Some parades are more sexualized, others want a more family-friendly vibe, and one isn't better or worse than the other.

So instead of ranting against exclusion and self-perceived hypocrisy, can we just say "Who gets represented depends on the local culture" or something along those lines? Can I get that one compromise out of you, and we can drop this whole thing?

As far as I'm concerned, we reached this compromise yesterday.