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Pride marches and parades won’t end homophobia.
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. An influx of
straight-oriented venues and their clientele is creating a level of insecurity
around Oxford Street
that hasn’t been experienced there for years. Local homo-activists recently
held a ‘Reclaim the Right’ rally at Harmony
Park, but while this
may be a way of publicising demands 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.
Sydney’s 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
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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Photo: AP
Photo/Rob Griffith
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