Finally, everyone can agree on something regarding Pride Month: it’s over.
Even the most ardent fans of the LGBTQ agenda must be exhausted by now — so much forced gaiety and pressure to celebrate, so many thrusting thongs on flabby (male) bodies, and drag queens in kabuki makeup, and huge corporations preening and pandering for approval.
In my childhood in the mid-1960s, being attracted to the same sex was deemed an abomination, a sin, even a crime — and a mental disorder.
It was directly, and inaccurately, equated with pedophilia.
People suffered and struggled, mostly invisible to the rest of us.
Recently, on a Sunday, by contrast, the New York City Pride March took over Manhattan, with 75,000 people dancing and strutting gleefully and giddily down blocked-off streets —and two million onlookers celebrating them.
For a political and lifestyle movement that claims to be so happy, it is weird that some LGBTQ leaders paint their people as being so downtrodden, their rights violated across the land and their lives at risk of genocide.
This is bunk.
The murder rate for trans people in the U.S. is two-thirds lower than for Americans over all (see my previous column).
In a nation of 330 million people, including some 23 million gay people (7%), hate crimes against gays total fewer than 2,000 per year, based on FBI stats.
Activist groups assert the real total is in the 15,000 range, still de minimis.
Plus, how can a group of people claim to be oppressed and victims of discrimination, when they are being celebrated in parades nationwide, and in commercials, TV shows, and sycophantic media coverage?
The Disney-owned ABC station in New York, WABC7NY.com, devoted three and a half hours of live coverage to the parade.
On-air hosts cited the Stonewall Inn, where the gay-rights revolution symbolically began in 1969 when drag queens fought back against a police raid, and other landmarks that "remind us the community has come a long way, but we have a lot of work to do."
Like what?
One anchor solemnly alludes to "what this community has been through for the last 50 years," and asks the WABC station manager: "There are threats against this community that are profound. So, how does that feel, as well?"
What threats?
The station manager vows: "Yeah, so, look, we will absolutely expand our coverage" of LGBTQ issues to 365 days a year.
The parade telecast touted a group that "fosters inclusive and safe environments for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and or gender non-performing Arab, Middle Eastern, and or North African folks in New York City and throughout the Greater New York area."
Quite the mouthful.
For such an inclusive event, I feel kind of excluded, as a white straight American male —or must I say "cisgender" male, an invented term, and state my pronouns, though they are self-evident?
Despite the clobbering Bud Light, Nike, and Disney endured by overstepping on LGBTQ issues, the New York parade had plenty of corporate supporters, including Chase, Hilton, Target, and Delta, as well as cosmetics brands Mac/Estee Lauder.
Other than makeup sales to drag queens, the commercial upside is scant.
The latest U.S. Census data show that gay households comprise 1% of U.S. households, and other estimates are that trans people number 0.005% of the population: five in one thousand.
So, companies do this for good will and virtue-signaling.
Nonetheless, this corporate kowtowing was insufficient, in the view of a co-host of the WABC show, Angelica Ross, a Black trans woman actress festooned in hundreds of feathers and a silky, butterfly-winged gown.
As Ross put it on-air:
"I love seeing all this solidarity, but, you know what?
"Corporations — it’s a little light. … We need all the corporations to stand together. We got black trans women and a queer folks who have been standing strong in this movement since the Stonewall days, since the beginning."
White gay male anchor: "Right, I mean, we built these relationships, and just because now is a time when a few radical voices can be loud isn’t the time to back down. And I will tell you one group that hasn’t — JetBlue."
Cue a parade procession of a few dozen JetBlue employees in corporate-logo T-shirts and tank tops.
Nice plug.
Dennis Kneale is a writer and media strategist in New York and host of the podcast, "What's Bugging Me." Previously, he was an anchor at CNBC and at Fox Business Network, after serving as a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal and managing editor of Forbes. Read Dennis Kneale's reports — More Here.