In Praise of Pride Merch, Part Two

Loss is, but so is LOVE.

This year, for the first time since burning-things-down summer, Amy and I joined the Philly Pride March. People of all ages were wrapped in every color of Pride flags, every sequined or tulle (or both!) permutation of every flavor of rainbow. So many young people with cute pansexual flags painted on their cheeks. Everyone there (aside from the requisite small group of surly religious folks) seemed so happy, so free, and SO STINKIN’ CUTE!

And there, at the end of the march, were the booths. My favorites were the independent artists. They were selling in-joke t-shirts, pronoun pins, big, bright PLUS SIZE! dresses. One booth had a flag pin selection so thorough that they had both the old and new versions of the polyamory flag.

And of course, there were organizations: for reproductive justice, for gender-affirming care, for getting out the vote. The National Parks Service was there making a flag out of rainbow “what inclusion means to me” postcards.

As I’m describing this day I kind of took for granted, it’s really hitting home how much history and effort and sacrifice had to happen to get us there. Just like those Freedom Rings were a key to a bigger life, Pride is a rebirth, reaffirmation, and continuous organizing of that bigger life. It feeds us and connect us and fills our field of vision with bright adorableness so we can be fortified to keep building a loving world.

There were corporations at Philly Pride too, banished to something called “corporate alley.” I love that for us.

But about those corporations: I am so, SO happy that my niece came of age in a time where her bisexuality was so ordinary that she could shop about it in the Target. I love that she could be like “Oh there’s a Star Trek themed Pride shirt this year and now I have a Star Trek themed Pride shirt.”

I love that I could super casually pick up a bi bandana to use as an in-case-there’s-teargas-and-also-because-Covid mask in the summer of 2020! Plus glittery rainbow socks.

When I see the Pride sections in regular stores, I always wonder what it would have felt like to see them as a kid. I was raised rurally and then sheltered-suburbanly in the Eighties and Nineties. For queerness, I pretty much had Madonna (whose records my mom let me get) and Culture Club (whose records she did not.) When I grew into hair bands, I had pretty, pretty Sebastian Bach on my wall making me feel gender things I didn’t have words for.

Would a beautiful activist Skittles package or a rack of multi-flagged tees have given me a language for what I was feeling? Maybe! Who knows! I didn’t even have a language for talking about “regular” sexuality, let alone for discussing queerness.

Which is why it really, really hurts my heart that violent, cruel monsters bullied Target into taking their Pride displays down. It feels like an end (hopefully just a temporary end) of a golden age. It’s not that I think corporations genuinely cared about us this past decade or so—it doesn’t make a difference to me how they feel, only that they’re adding more rainbows (And therefore, I think, more queer visibility) to the world. We really, really need all the rainbows we can get.

I value Corporate Pride not so much as a part of activism as a bellweather, as a symbol that we were powerful enough to be a mainstream thing, marketed to like everybody else. Selling us stuff is not an act of altruism, but it lets us see our progress nonetheless. It lets us see ourselves.

I know the tyranny of disinformation, violence, and fucked up “anti-woke” initiatives won’t prevail in the long run, but for now I just want to stop and feel the pain of losing a little ground. Pride is much bigger than cruelty, stupidity, white supremacy, much bigger and more powerful than brute force. It’s love, y’all, and there’s absolutely nothing they can do to overcome love.