Each year my city holds at least 2 separate Prides. One is organized by the city itself, it is what you would call the Corporate Pride – with the help of sponsors like Israel or the US, they manage to rent fancy buildings and invite tiktok influencers to talk about how “it is what it is” and then celebrate with a nice parade at the end. The other is a self-described Radical Pride, a Pride that supposedly attempts to return to the roots of Pride and distance queers from capitalism. It was a big year this time around as EuroPride was about to happen at my city while the Radical Pride people were celebrating “their victory” over the government legalizing gay marriage (more on that later). So why is it, then, that I think both events this year were equally a waste of time?
2 weeks before EuroPride was about to hit, I was already prepared for a lot of actions we could take. I made “Take Euro out of Pride” and “No Pride in Genocide” stencils, got myself a new spray can and was trying to convince my friends to join in on my creativity. After all, it was important to make our presence known – Fascist teens were already talking about an attack on us queers during pride back in March after a trans couple was attacked, but at the same time we had to make it clear that we were against the corporate and racist elements the EU was trying to pass. To my surprise no-one, neither my friends nor my affinity group, was all that interested. I was really upset – I’ve been preparing for this ever since December and yet I was alone in my enthusiasm for disruption? The weeks passed and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Normally corporate pride is full of people in busy places, sometimes events would have so many people that you’d have to book a seat. I was expecting double, maybe triple the amount – instead what we got was a disappointing list of stale speeches that no-one bothered to even show up to (including the fascists). My affinity group intervened in one event by shouting pro-palestine messages, got arrested, got let go and some leftist news sites wrote about it. Then, a large parade was celebrated in European groups as the pinnacle of queer acceptance or whatever and it was all over. I genuinely believed I was the only one who took this whole thing seriously, but I was simply misunderstanding the point of all this – it is not about making a successful event, but about making people believe the event was successful.
1 week before EuroPride I found myself in a meeting with the Radical Pride groups. Technically they were running under a different group but it’s the same people. I was called there because an org participating with them finally had hard evidence of various acts of bigotry from certain other members, and since I was annoyingly loud about the bigotries since forever they decided they’d invite me to spectate. As a sign of how important they thought this is, they made it so it would be the final subject of the 4 hour long meeting that I was forced to sit through – not that I regret it though, I got some really valuable info. For example: the members were openly talking about taking advantage of EuroPride by renting various spaces and running Pride themed events “to take some money for future events”. After all that had passed, and when faced with proof of her sharing transphobic ideas during previous Pride events, one of the members responded in a very interesting way. She said the evidence should be thrown away, not because she denies it ever happened or because she changed her mind, but simply because “it would make us look bad”. According to her, it doesn’t matter whether she is a TERF or not – “if the outsiders think we are progressive, that’s all that matters for the movement”.
Politics is like a play to these people. The outsider acts as the audience, looking at the spectacle set on stage – it is a glamorous show made for them! It does not matter what shady things happen behind the scenes, if those who make the spectacle possible are horrible people manipulating those behind the curtains – unless of course that cruelty is shown to the audience. The goal, you see, is to draw people in and fill those empty seats – to keep them at just the right distance where they are enthralled by the spectacle but not curious enough to look beyond it. And after they have gathered a crowd, it’s time for the real meaning of this whole play to reveal itself. For Marxists that usually means talking about class (as they view capitalism as the root cause behind everything evil in life), while for corporations it’s self liberation through the market – either way, the primary goal overshadows the secondary one (our struggles) as they try to lead the spectators to a different cause. In other words: those who genuinely care about us are being targeted by those people, with the goal of taking advantage of their interest in our liberation to make them join whatever bullshit orgs they make this time.
I have seen this happen in many ideological circles, not just in marxist or capitalist ones. The same anarchist org that banned me for calling them transphobes over refusing to acknowledge trans and nonbinary people, were then sharing texts with gender inclusive language 2 days later after a trans couple was attacked, for instance. As long as the main goal is to build this Spectacle, this Phantasm of theirs, nothing of value will ever come out of these people. They will deny being homophobic towards you, and if you show them videos of them calling you a fag, they’ll claim it’s being rude but “doesn’t count as homophobia” just to avoid the label – to them it’s all about that label, not about the acts that led to them being labelled. In order to avoid falling into this trap myself, I make sure to switch accounts and identities online whenever I get the chance. Any irl act of mine is nameless, without an org or signature, I intentionally hide myself inside that crowd they want to so desperately attract. And I will continue to sabotage their plays, to make noise, to pull down curtains. There must be no space for these people in our spaces – reveal what they truly are!
-Antisocial Anarchist