Pride

If any of you gay people kiss in public anywhere near my children, I will smash your heads in.

Is what a lawyer in Montenegro, frequently engaged by the largest Orthodox church in the Western Balkans, member in good standing of his professional organization, and a father, posted on Facebook one fine day in 2020. When the local media reported about it in disbelief and asked for a statement expecting him to plead a cat typing incident or a bout of drunken late night shitposting, when members of the public and activists petitioned his law association, he used to opportunity to double down, and proudly.

Montenegro is my terra and my heartbreak, and the place where I should probably be right now, because being out in Montenegro is not a walk in the park, Montenegro is exactly where an out Montenegrin should be living. But I am in Toronto, one of the most liberal places in the world, where we’ve forgotten what actual homophobia sounds like, where libraries carrying a range of books get called transphobic, where people who don’t evangelize for trans self-ID are called bigots, where psychotherapists might lose their jobs under activist pressure if they don’t automatically affirm trans-identified adolescents. Where Pride corporation has officially come out against comedy and municipal libraries, and previously against the police officers marching in uniform, and latterly the floats themselves, as environmentally unfriendly. This Pride Month, the feeling of oppression is at a high pitch. In Toronto, Canada.

We also see racism everywhere in 2022. Can I tell another story from Montenegro, where as a good liberal democrat, I should be living right now and thus increasing the weak numbers of liberal anti-ethnonationalists on the ground? A modest farm owned by a Roma woman was burned down recently, for the second time, perpetrators unknown. There is only one reason a Roma-owned anything would be burned down. The elderly woman was not involved in organized crime; she owned some cattle and a patch of land. That is what racism looks like. Because we clearly need reminding. Not Wendy Mesley quoting the n-word in a meeting, or Frances Widdowson asking if there are any actual human remains behind that school in Kamloops, the allegations of which have thrown the entire country in turmoil. We have completely lost the plot.

The Pride Parade is returning this month after two years of pandemic silence, soaked in American political debates through and through. The Pride constituency itself has bloated over the years from LGB into LGBT, then LGBTQ, then 2SLGBTQI, then fortunately the I was dropped but then a plus sign added to signal that proliferation of consumer approaches to sexuality will continue. I’ve seen A for Asexuals and various other versions. Demi-sexual etc. The constituency is rendered meaningless, and with it political activism on its behalf. Why and when was T added to the LGB, when T marks not a sexual orientation but a different vector of issues—did we run out of problems, within the LGB acronym? I remember well the campaign for same-sex marriage in the early to mid noughts. You were told you were a bigot if you expressed reservations about same-sex marriage. Today, however, for the well-marketed and well-funded LGBTQ+ advocacy industry, sex dimorphism in human mammals doesn’t exist. The magic dust of self-ID is where it’s at. Referring to biological sex is an extreme right-wing dog whistle. I wish I could go back to the same-sex marriage debates and tell those misguided sex realists of yesteryear how the problem could have been solved.

The Pride and the adjacent religious rituals (the flag omnipresence and Pride-ization of every corporate logo, the days of remembrance, the runs, the PFLAG, the dyke and trans marches) are American in origin, but exported around the world as essential tools of homo liberation anywhere. First Prides in the Western Balkans were attempted in the early twenty-teens, under constant and overt threats of violence for all involved. Police protecting the marchers were more numerous than the marchers themselves. This was the case in Belgrade, Serbia, and in several cities of Montenegro where the Pride took place. Bosnia Herzegovina did not jump into Parading, probably wisely. The conditions are not there, was the explanation; the event is likely to have adverse effects. Let’s do the job of education, support and sheltering and the parades will come in due course. Montenegro too had shelters for kids thrown out of homes, and a police force well trained to deal with domestic and anti-LGBT violence, but was also spending a lot of energy on its Prides. They are now largely uneventful, pleasant affairs. The society has become much more surface-polite about these matters, but beneath the surface trouble lurks. Its NGOs for LGBT rights meanwhile are following the lingo as it develops inside the offices of their western funders, and that lingo is changing in leaps. I’ve recently watched a clip from a presser held by a queer rights organization in Montenegro whose president demanded a legal guarantee for “trans self-ID, to match the best practices in western legal systems” and the “easier access to cross-sex hormones”. This in a society that is nowhere near acceptance of same-sex relationships, where the people who are out at work can be counted on the fingers of one hand. But just like in the west, the mission creep in advocacy groups be mission-creeping.

Meanwhile in the anglosphere, the LGBTQetc has largely become transactivism. It’s not comme il faut to complain about the surge in trans-identified teenage girls who want to identify out of womanhood and lesbianism, or to question their desire for mastectomies and testosterone. It’s not polite to insists that some people are simply same-sex (or opposite sex) attracted, and that’s just a fact, not the second coming of South African Apartheid. It’s passé to propose that gender-non-conforming kids are fine as they are and not “deep down” the opposite sex. The Pride flag itself seems to be permanently up for grabs now, with the standard rainbow officially outflanked by the chevron in trans flag colours, itself surely to be redacted with additional colours or geometric shapes in the near future.

I think a lot about code-switching when I’m on a flight to Montenegro. Wokism there has not taken hold in meaning-making institutions and there is more moral clarity in political fights. Words like homophobia, or genocide, or misogyny are not trivialized. One of Montenegro’s first gay rights activists now lives in Vancouver, where he emigrated as a refugee—you read that right—from a country that was not at war, but back then perhaps had a harder time acknowledging the humanity of the same-sex attracted. Declaring yourself same-sex attracted can still mean trouble in my Montenegro.

Declaring yourself same-sex attracted in my Canada, on the other hand, is quite alri... Wait. Wait a second.

I have photographic evidence that 1) I was young once, and 2) Pride used to value freedom of speech. Lesbian Billionaires, a group lampooning the corporatization of Pride, was *the* occasion to get the vintage and camp items of clothing out of the closet.