As we near the end of Pride Month, we’ve come across this interesting commentary in The Free Press from a gay man by the name of Ben Kawaller.

Kawaller writes for Los Angeles Magazine. Today, as a gay man, he is interrogating the Pride movement. He muses, “Can a boring old ‘G’ Still Hang With the LBTQIAs?”:

Earlier this month I strolled around the L.A. Pride parade in Hollywood. There I met a gay eleven-year-old boy who had to contend not with being routinely bullied, but with the fact that the two other gay boys in his class were dating each other and not him (and who’s to say which is worse, really?). I met a whole slew of gay-looking girls who identified as everything from queer to lesbian to trans, and who very politely tolerated my interrogations on everything from their pronouns to their chest-bindings. I met a ten-year-old who told me she was nonbinary and pansexual. Or rather, they were nonbinary and pansexual.

I felt approximately 90. It’s not like the various identities comprising “LGBTQ+” are totally new to me, but at the end of the day I’m just a boring old G who came of age at a time when most of these labels had yet to be invented.”-Ben Kawaller, The Free Press

Kawaller raises a curious point Pride then versus Pride now. There was born this way…and now, there’s a whole lot of aesthetics and performance.

I had this thought, while talking to a 25-year-old lesbian who was still ‘figuring out’ her gender identity: there’s a tribe out there that plays a game, an optional way of thinking about oneself, called ‘gender,’and the opt-in nature of this game is reflected in the tribe’s own language. For instance, GLSEN—once the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, now just a thing called GLSEN—proclaims that ‘Everyone gets to decide their gender identity for themselves and this designation can also change over time.’ Can anyone imagine such a thing being said about sexual orientation? It must also come as a surprise to people with gender dysphoria that their internal sense of gender is a choice.”-Ben Kawaller

You don’t need to look hard at the performance and the aesthetics of this movement. Just walk into any middle or high school in America. I’m serious. This is where you will find the performance and aesthetics on display for all to see. Once, sweet little Jane in Kindergarten is now “J” and is self-identified as “non-gender-conforming-binary-with-a-touch-of-lesbian”. Juliette has changed her name to Romeo. Danielle became Danny for a while but then decided on a more nondescript name; Dana, because she decided she wanted to dress like a boy on some days and be feminine on others. Parents, wanting the best for their kids, play into these performances. After all, in some left-coast states, kids can emancipate themselves and call it “abuse” if their parents put the foot down and said this is all ridiculous.

Pray tell me how a ten-year-old knows she is nonbinary and, excuse me, pansexual? Has this kid even had a sexual thought in her mind just yet? This is where we look to where and how these kids get these ideas in the first place:

Take back what I said about performance and aesthetics starting in middle school. Our mouthpieces are making sure this theatre of the absurd begins in elementary school. Big government, big money and, who can forget, Hollywood parents-just who you wanted to listen to. These big dumbasses will talk proudly about their decision to be mothers later in life (they’ve aborted their other children until it was “time”). They’ll talk about the fierce women that they are because they are mothers raising daughters. They will also say, in the same breath, that their daughters can be anything they want to be, to include any gender or sexual persuasion they choose while still referring to their child’s biological gender.

And people actually like their Instagram posts and listen to them, as if they are the authority on parenting.

Is this so surprising? If the gay activism I grew up with was about securing equal rights, LGBTQ+ activism looks more like a cultural project aimed at reforming our ideas about gender and sexuality. It also doesn’t seem to be able to help itself from looking absurd: according to Google, we’re now a community that can be described as LGBTQQIP2SAA. Hell, that makes me want to cancel gay marriage.”-Ben Kawaller, The Free Press

So, can a “boring old ‘G'” hang with the LGBTQQIP2SAA-blahbity, blah, blah tribe? I’d say, the answer is a resounding “no”. After all, “gay” is so 1985 and “boring”. And, with definitions such as “gyno-sexual” and that of a lesbian changing from a “woman being attracted to women” to a “non-man being attracted to non-men” (thanks, Johns Hopkins, for this medical genius), why would a gay man or a lesbian woman want any part of this theatre teeters on making a mockery of their sexuality they have struggled with in their youth?

But once I was a teenager who ached and pined and wrote awful poetry and sometimes wore makeup and wanted very badly to be a different, better version of himself. I wonder what place that kid would find for himself if he lived in this new world. I’d like to think he could happily conceive of himself as a gay boy. . . but who can say?”-Ben Kawaller

Pride month is almost over and they don’t want it to end. Every month should celebrate this freak show, they say. Sadly enough, the freak show is here to stay for a while. All the “cool kids” are doing it. Ugly clothes and chest binders from Target, androgynous hairstyles, pronouns that make no sense, gender identities that are even more convoluted, masked kids yelling at you for eating at a Chick-Fil-A and uttering confusing stupidities as “there are more than two genders” are all the rage and part of a contagious cultural performance and aesthetic. Buckle up. More to come.

Featured Image: Dale Cruse/Flickr.com/cropped/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)