To state the incredibly obvious, Them is a website for chronically online queer people made by chronically online queer people. This year marks something like my twelfth Pride as an out queer person, which means that it is also the dozenth time that I am knee-deep in the trenches known as “annual Pride discourse,” a sentence which made me sigh deeply and put my head in my hands upon having to type it.
Each year like clockwork, the LGBTQ+ community comes together to argue online pointlessly about truly the most unnecessary topics imaginable. Back in the halcyon days of 2019, I weighed in on the topic du jour, which seemed to be that we should bulldoze every gay bar and replace it with a queer café for the sake of “inclusivity” or something.
Since then, it seems, the prevailing topic has been “kink at pride,” with some arguing that adults who dare to show up to parades in pup hoods and leather harnesses should be burned at the stake for potentially exposing children to their depravity. (Never mind that kids go to the beach and see people who are just as scantily clad all the time, and no one is traumatized for it). People may now be coming to the grim realization that the “kink at Pride” discourse was essentially making the exact same arguments that the right is currently using to criminalize drag and trans existence, because they (blessedly) seem to be putting that one on the backburner for now.
Unfortunately, that means that this year, everyone seems to be arguing about — or joking about arguing about — bisexual women and their straight boyfriends. God help us all. Thankfully, I have curated my social media feeds such that I have only encountered jokes about the “bi women with straight boyfriends” discourse. Regrettably, however, I’ve heard that on other corners of the internet, people are earnestly and passionately fighting over whether or not your local woman with cuffed jeans and enamel pins should be allowed to bring Chad to the dyke march.
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Don’t get me wrong, I definitely cared about things like this at one point. I even made my own joke about it… nearly two years ago. But as far as earnestly getting mad about straight people at Pride goes, that was back when I was a teenager whose only access to queer community was in the classroom of my high-school English teacher (a.k.a. my emotional support animal) during GSA meetings. It would be one thing if I only saw Pride discourse from teenagers on the internet. But sadly, there are grown adults spending their one wild and precious life on Rihanna’s internet being Like This.
Rather than try to stage an actual intervention into the discourse, I instead want to offer this: we as a community need to realize how little posting about these topics matters. With the full understanding that this is a super hypocritical thing to say as someone who managed to make being a gay Tumblr expat into a career, this Pride month I want to urge all of us to log off. “Touch grass,” if you will. If you want to go to Pride, go to Pride. Yes, even you, Chad. As we have covered extensively, the past few years have seen a historic deluge of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the U.S., which has led to an uptick in broader homophobic and transphobic sentiment. We have way more important things to worry about than Chad.
I often sense that people’s hypervigilance about labels stems from a deeper sense of insecurity about one’s own identity. (I know that was definitely the case for me when I was a teenager.) And I also know that not everyone has the luxury of real-life queer community, especially as right-wingers increasingly demonize the mere existence of LGBTQ+ gathering spaces. But I promise that the pleasures of engaging with actual queer people — or actual queer history — far outweigh the short-lived dopamine rush that is getting a bunch of likes on a TikTok about how Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” must be exclusively interpreted as a song about a lesbian in the throes of compulsory heterosexuality.
That engagement with actual queer people can absolutely happen online, too. LGBTQ+ people have always used the internet to connect with others. But again, a comments section where everyone is taking everything in the worst faith possible does not a community make. Actual desire is far more expansive than the digital pages of the Lesbian Masterdoc could ever encapsulate. And if social justice is your jam, I promise the most impactful thing you could do with spare minutes on your phone is to shut the hell up and literally just Venmo a trans person some money.
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