In yet another example of far-reaching overgeneralizing about contemporary US society (damn there are so many of those), Camille Paglia asserts there’s an epidemic of sex frustration among the white bourgeois—a caste to which a wide swath of Seattle either belongs or aspires.
The essay appears in the NY Times on the day of the Seattle gay pride parade. This does not in any way disprove her thesis, at least as far as it might be applied here.
The Seattle establishment (heart)s gays not because of their sexuality, but in spite of said establishment’s fear of sexuality in general.
Gays are the Seattle powers-that-be’s favorite minority group because they’re so much less “minority-y.” You can be gay and still be an upscale white person. Supporting the gays allows a local company, agency, or institution to proclaim its inclusiveness, without having to examine caste or race inequality.
What’s more, lovin’ the gays allows straight Seattleites to assert their moral superiority over Those People Out There In Evil Mainstream America. We’ve got no bigots here, no siree. We welcome clean-cut people with money no matter what they do in the privacy of their well-appointed homes.
But the great disruptive thing about the pride parade is there’s always someone to crash the party. Someone who takes outness a little more seriously than it’s supposed to be taken. While the official parade attractions were mostly trite (down to the official theme, “Over the Rainbow”), the attendees felt no need to be safely “different.”
There were fully nude men, with paint or see-thru thongs.
There was a young (straight) couple, the female of whom was shirtless, making out on the sidewalk in pure hormonal bliss.
Various clothed boy-boy and girl-girl combos also hugged and kissed a lot. They weren’t settling for public tolerance. They were practicing their love in full view. No pleas or false modesties or passive-aggressive apologies. Just passion, compassion, and shameless lust.
That’s worth more than a hundred guys dressed up as Dorothy standing on bar-sponsored floats.
