Going into Pride Month this year I find myself demonstrably happier and in a better place than in any previous year. Perhaps unrelatedly, I also find myself far more enthusiastic about the concept of Gay Pride. I was, once, sympathetic to the arguments that pride is counterproductive—a celebration of abnormality and sexual openness that belies the (implicitly desirable) notion that we’re just like everyone else. Yet when I look around me, the queers of all stripes in my life are different. Often enough to be a strong trend if not invariably, the people who seem to be the most vitally and actively engaged with their lives and the world around them—the people making things, the people hosting and building real communities—tend to be queer. Rather exemplary is perhaps how a somewhat rightist twitter mutual commented the other day that part of the reason gay pride is such an event is just that humans naturally love festivities, and the trads aren’t running a competing offer. That vitality—in a society that often seems devoid of it—is, I think, something to be proud of.
I’ve felt for some time that one of the great pitfalls of our age is passivity; the retreat from doing things to watching others—professionals, often—do things. Since the pandemic it seems much easier, and for many somehow preferable, to maintain an almost frictionless existence hold up in an apartment or spacious suburban pile, nourished on delivery food and parasocial simulacra. I do not contend that queers are immune to this tendency—just that we seem to be more likely to be dissatisfied by passivity and driven to seek out vitality and human connection, even in small or marginal ways. Learning to nurture that drive, and to privilege it over whatever frictions and anxieties stand in the way, has been the driving force that’s made me so much happier in the past couple of years.
Media
Still, slowly, reading Aspiration, will hopefully be done soon. I think I’ll have more thoughts on it, and on watching this year’s other piece of breakout trans cinema, I Saw The TV Glow, soon. I want to write about how we decide which of our selves privilege the concept of “destiny”, but I don’t yet feel like I have the ideas sufficiently organized.