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Pride marches and parades won’t end homophobia, writes Jason Foster.
2008 marks 30 years since Sydney’s gay and lesbian Mardi Gras began as a protest march demanding the legalisation of homosexuality. It seems strange to think that back then – well within living memory – you could be jailed for engaging in sexual acts with another adult of the same sex. How things have changed.
Then again, how things have remained the same. Despite three decades of Mardi Gras, Sydney has recently witnessed a spate of anti-gay violence, right in the heart of Australian gaydom, creating a level of insecurity around Oxford Street.
Activists recently held a ‘Reclaim the Right’ rally at Harmony Park, but while this may be a way of publicising demands for police action and maximising public support, it can’t be expected to address the root cause of the problem.
The rise in homophobic violence also raises questions about the value of gay pride marches as means to achieve social change.
The Mardi Gras parade has become such a well-known event that it attracts a sizeable straight audience, but obviously it hasn’t had that much effect in changing attitudes towards homosexuality in Australian society. Otherwise you’d expect downtown Sydney to be the one place where gay-bashing wouldn’t occur.
No doubt the level of aversion to non-heterosexuals is not as great as it was even twenty years ago, but as far as out-loud-and-proud campaigns for acceptance go, maybe the gay community has hit the wall.
After all, the Mardi Gras parade and Melbourne’s Pride March don’t exactly challenge the ideas on which heterosexism is based. If there are two things the majority of people don’t like about gayness, it’s what they perceive or believe to be the proclivity for so-called ‘gender-bending’ and the preoccupation with sex.
As far as many people are concerned, these events are spectacles in sexual exhibitionism that only show how mixed up and narcissistic gay people are; a perception that is confirmed by the media’s tendency to go looking for participants who fit this image.
Perhaps some of the more stereotypical participants hope that by getting wider exposure they’ll also gain acceptance, but I suspect this is a false hope. There’s only so much sex-gender transgression that your normal heterosexual can stomach – and it ain’t much at that.
Heterosexuality inevitably gives rise to a psychological division of gender roles between men and women, and masculine and feminine, that conditions people to perform their different roles in hetero-sex. So as long as human beings are made to reproduce through straight sex, there’s always going to be some antagonism towards those who don’t fit the norm.
The question is how this can be mitigated.
However, it’s not just a problem of image. The whole idea behind the Mardi Gras parade and Pride March focuses on sexual orientation as a source of identity, thus reinforcing the division between the hetero majority and the non-hetero minority. But emphasising the differences between people enables us to treat others as something other than individuals and human beings.
Fighting prejudice by trying to affirm the focus of that prejudice as something positive is always going to be fraught, as it reinforces the us-them mentality that the prejudice is built on.
The only way it could work is if you could show that the source of that difference was a good thing. On this score, both the Mardi Gras parade and the Pride March leave something to be desired.
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March ado about nothing
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