Goodbye, Mr. Chaps
Nick Shapland, a tall, well-tanned and skinny 22-year-old with carefully tousled brown hair, won’t be one of them.
“Gay Pride is boring,” said the self-described poet and resident of Williamsburg.
It was 2:30 in the morning, and he and two friends were standing outside the East Village gay bar Phoenix, where Bud and Bud Light are on offer for a dollar a cup on Wednesdays, debating the point. One of his friends seemed appalled, but only registered it by shaking his head disapprovingly as Mr. Shapland went on.
“Maybe in the 60’s, it was fun when you’re like, ‘Fuck you! Fuck you, I’m gay and you’re an asshole,’ you know?” Mr. Shapland said. “Then you fast-forward from 19-whenever—whenever the gay revolution was, I don’t know, I’m not a scholar—things go on and get kind of boring.”
A few days later, on Sunday, June 17, Brian O’Dell, a co-founder of Heritage of Pride, the organization that convenes a week of Gay Pride events each year, looked out over the green at Bryant Park.
“We used to get thousands of people at an event like this,” he said.
This was the Rally, the kickoff event of the week, and traditionally a magnet for New York’s politically motivated gays. Memorable speeches from the likes of Harry Hay, Urvashi Vaid and Morty Manford have thundered through the podium at the Rally in decades past, to the applause of thousands.
But on this Sunday, the lawn was mostly empty, with a crowd of about a hundred people watching comedians Keith Price and Julie Goldman take the stage. Press material for the event had anticipated a crowd of 8,000.
“There’s sort of this indifference to Pride,” he said.
Out of the Streets and Into the Boardroom
37 years ago, the first Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day Parade made its way through the streets of Greenwich Village in tribute to the police raid on the Stonewall bar a year before, an event that is credited around the world as the birth of the international gay-rights movement.
In its beginnings, the parade was an explicitly political affair, largely the work of affluent, white left-leaners consciously grabbing the Stonewall events as a rallying point for New York’s largely closeted gay and lesbian population.
One of its great messages was that closeted gays and lesbians were working alongside New Yorkers at white-shoe law firms, big accounting firms, in entertainment, the arts, publishing, journalism, politics.
After all, the message “out of the closet and into the streets!” could hardly have been aimed at people who were living out their gay lives there already.
Four years later, an article in The New York Times described the paraders—“most of whom were white and most of whom were young”—marching “past smiling policemen, wide-eyed tourists and blasé New Yorkers who passed it off with a live-and-let-live shrug.”
But over the last three decades, as that demographic has largely come out of the closet, and gotten a little more than a “live and let live” shrug when they emerged, there doesn’t seem to be much for them to march for.
And yet, as Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and a co-founder of Heritage of Pride, is quick to point out, the Annual Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride March that now spans from Fifth Avenue to Christopher Street has never been larger.
So who stays away? While no census is conducted at the parade, everyone you talk to knows the answer to that question: anyone who’s got money; anyone who’s likely to get money one day soon; anyone who wants to act like they have money. Some will say “white people”; others won’t.
“If you start at the top of the parade on Fifth Avenue, you see the well-heeled tourists and straight allies,” said Alan Van Capelle, executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, a group that lobbies the New York State government on gay issues. “In Chelsea, you see folks who own apartments and who can afford those rents and who are sitting out on their balconies with mixed cocktails that are in really beautiful colors and in terrifically shaped glasses. Then you work through the parade and get to the Village and you see more people of color.”
That’s sort of the catch. One queer journalist, Richard Goldstein, the former executive editor of The Village Voice, wonders if the trip through the Village has anything to do with the decline in the deep-pocketed New Yorker at the parade.
“White people say they experience the parade as being tired and corny,” said Mr. Goldstein. “They’ll say it’s unattractive to them. The reason it’s unattractive to them is because there are all these faces of people of color from all over the world.
“What happens is the parade gets blacker and blacker,” he said. “Fewer white people feel drawn to it. The result is, to be seen at the parade is a little déclassé.”
Mr. O’Dell of Heritage of Pride said he’s heard this before.
“I’ve heard the same criticism about people who go to [the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center],” he said. “They say the center is just for people who are just coming out, for people who are in recovery, or for people of color or lesbians and it’s not for white men like me—someone who has a great job and plenty of friends.”
Clarence Patton, the executive director of the Anti-Violence Project, which is devoted to the prevention of violence against gays and lesbians, thinks the issue of Pride is more about class than race.
“If I look around at my friends who are not white and who are middle or upper class and ask if they go to the parade, well, they don’t go, either,” he said.
Whatever the case: “People seem less whipped up about it than they used to be,” said Tom Duane, the gay State Senator whose districts include Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen. “There’s less fervor among those who are close to, or already have achieved, the American Dream.”
“Gay people in New York are feeling more secure and less discriminated against and that gives them a sense of complacency,” said Ethan Geto, the longtime gay Democratic activist.
“Some people,” said Dennis Spafford, a spokesman for Heritage of Pride, “don’t care anymore.”
New York, Where Every Day Is Gay Pride Parade
“I live in New York, and it’s sort of like every day is Gay Pride Parade,” said Matt Davie, 37, an associate publisher at Simon & Schuster, standing in the main room of G Lounge in Chelsea on June 14. “It’s not this special day that I can suddenly throw on my rainbow flag, or whatever. That’s every day. I don’t need this special day where I’m out of the closet.”
“We’ve been able to benefit from a lot of things from the Parade and all that it symbolizes, and now you have this option to opt out of it,” said Mr. Patton, who goes every year largely because of his work at the Anti-Violence Project. “What you see is a lot of people exercising that option.”
He said he and friends who work for gay causes talk often about whether they’d go if they didn’t have to for work. The consensus seems to be that they wouldn’t.
Last week, more than a dozen gay men interviewed at gay bars said they wouldn’t attend the parade (only two said they would: one who said he’s been living here for eight months, the other for nine months). One generation that actively attended seems to have grown up, and another younger one doesn’t seem interested to begin with.
A 26-year-old graduate student in art history at New York University, Joe Ackley, who was at the Phoenix last Wednesday, doesn’t go.
“I hate Pride. My friend and I celebrate Pride by going to straight bars.”
One of his friends, Harry Layman, a 27-year-old Columbia law student, went two years ago and didn’t enjoy it.
“It’s so fucking long, that parade. It’s like two miles, it’s always on the hottest day of the year and I don’t want to be peppy about being gay for like fucking 50 blocks.”
Andy, a 33-year-old video editor for NBC, agreed.
“I mean, I’ll go to any party. If there’s an excuse for a party, I’ll go. But at one point the parade gets really crowded and unenjoyable. I think at one point it meant something, you know, like in the 1970’s, it was a big deal. It’s so passé now. I just feel like we’re a little advanced, we’re a little past that.”
At Barracuda last Thursday night, a bartender and a 33-year-old man in advertising complained that the parade didn’t represent people like them.
“I just want to see like normal, everyday people represented in the parade,” said Oswaldo Barbosa, the 33-year-old.
“Well, you would jump on the lawyers float! The businessman float!” said Al McKeever, a 30-year old Barracuda bartender.
“Well, I would jump on that,” replied Mr. Barbosa.
But for many like him, there’d be little reason to do that even if there were such a float.
On June 19, the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison had a private Pride party for partners and associates on the rooftop of the Hotel Gansevoort. And on June 15, Bloomingdale’s held a corporate Pride party in its store on Lexington Avenue, complete with a D.J.
Could this be the Pride of the Future in New York: Private events on rooftops instead of an all-encompassing march that includes everything from Dykes on Bikes to samba dancers to buff Chelsea boys with butterfly wings?
Not for Ramona Gray, a 36-year-old from New Brunswick who was volunteering at the Sunday rally.
“When you come here, you can really just be yourself,” said Ms. Gray. “There’s no hiding, no pretenses, no nothing. It’s just you and there’s no better feeling in the world than being able to let go. That’s priceless.”
“Actually, I met a couple people today who are from Jersey City and Elizabeth, and it’s like, ‘Are you serious? You live in Jersey?’” she said. “Oh my god, so we’re all excited that we might be able to start a community in Jersey. So that’s just worth it all. Even if it’s like three or four people, like who knows in a month, it’s like I know this person, let me call my friend and we end up with 20 people. It’s exciting.”
It’s Ms. Gray’s third Gay Pride Parade. How much more march is left in her?
The problem, many said, is that once the personal issues are resolved, the parade depends upon an overarching political purpose to succeed. And, well, there isn’t one.
“The parade is a blank canvas that can have any message written in New York,” said Mr. Foreman. “But right now there is no overarching community message. You can’t deny there is something very different from the peak of the AIDS epidemic.”
Complacency? Personal satisfaction? Political shallowness? What keeps the affluent gays away exactly?
“The reason I don’t go anymore is, where I’ve reached a stage in my life where I realize everyone there is a walking cliché of a gay person,” said Gerald Hansen, a 38-year-old who teaches E.S.L., who was speaking at the Phoenix. “All they do is live their lives from the fact that they’re gay. They watch gay movies or subscribe to the gay network and they’ll only call a gay plumber, or whatever. Those are the only people that go to that parade.”
Likewise, a man who wouldn’t give his name and who was at G Lounge said, “The parade has given us the opportunity to assimilate into society, but when there are boys dancing around in Speedos and butterfly wings, how are you going to go into Goldman Sachs the next day and work?”
“The demographic was really pretty much galvanized by the onset and continuation of the AIDS epidemic, and that continued through the 80’s and early 90’s,” said Mr. Patton. “There is certainly an idea that a lot of the community that experienced H.I.V. earlier in the epidemic have this idea it’s not as pressing or persistent or pervasive as an issue. It is part of it.”
“There was a consensus of a response that previous administrations—Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani—were pretty awful,” Mr. Foreman said. “People don’t feel that way about Mayor Bloomberg. In order to have that kind of response, you need an enemy, and we had plenty of them back then.”
“When there isn’t a health crisis or political crisis,” he said, “it looks much like other community events when people celebrate their pride without much history.”
“Would I like to see all those gay people along the parade route?” asked Mr. Duane. “Yes, I would. But as long as they’re sending a check, I’ll let them off the hook this year.”
So Who’s Paying?
But they’re not.
As all nonprofits know—and Heritage of Pride is a scrappy, volunteer sort of nonprofit with only two full-time employees—losing touch with your affluent demographic can make life difficult.
For the first time in a long time, it has run into debt, a spokesman said.
The financial picture is bleak. In 2004, Heritage of Pride raised $2 million for the event, while in 2005 that dropped to $1.8 million and last year that fell to $1.5 million, according to financial statements released by the organization. Organizers fear that number could drop again this year, with operating costs standing steady at $1.6 million.
The number of gay businesses that have given to the parade has declined, said Mr. O’Dell. For the first time, mailings sent to individual donors were discontinued this year; the costs of the mailings were too expensive and the donations were too few.
“We need money,” said Mr. Spafford. “This year we’re in a deficit and we shouldn’t be running under.”
Mr. O’Dell, meanwhile, painted a picture so dreary that the members within the organization are hopeful for a really hot day this upcoming Sunday. The reason for such a tiny wish? So they can sell lots of beer and water to thirsty dancers at Dance 21: The Dance on the Pier on Pier 54 along the Hudson River and turn a hefty profit.
The financial woes only speak to part of the problem. Mr. O’Dell said he’s seen a general setback in support.
PrideFest, the street festival that takes place after the parade on Washington Street, was canceled this year when the Mayor’s office rejected a permit to change the event’s location to Eighth Avenue in Chelsea. Mr. O’Dell said he was forced to cancel PrideFest because there weren’t enough volunteers for the narrow walkway on Washington Street.
He figured the gay community would have been up in arms—least of which at Heritage of Pride—for canceling the event.
“In the past, people would have been totally pissed off at us,” said Mr. O’Dell, who is 50. “I totaled how many people sent me angry e-mails when they heard our event was cancelled. I probably got a dozen e-mails out of hundreds of thousands of LGBT people. It was interesting. One was from a woman complaining. All the others were from men who were from out of town.”
Similarly, on June 12 the Heritage of Pride organized a protest outside the Mayor’s Pride event at Gracie Mansion. A leaflet passed to various organizations asked gay activists to rally against the Mayor’s decision to deny a permit allowing the street festival to move to Chelsea. “If you must attend this event we ask that you please wear a BLACK ribbon to show your solidarity,” the leaflet read.
No one who walked in or out of the Mayor’s Pride event stopped to listen to the protesters, and only seven people showed up at the rally anyway, Mr. Spafford said.
“They were walking by us and didn’t want to be associated with us,” he said.
“The problem is if the parade isn’t being replenished,” said Mr. Patton. “You need the rite of passage, and once you’ve done your rite of passage—and that can be one parade or 10 parades—you don’t necessarily go back. Once you’ve got your nourishment, you move on.”
“Who has benefited from the Pride Parade so far that they get to opt out of something like the Pride Parade now?” Mr. Patton asked.
Copyright © 2007 The New York Observer. All rights reserved.
