It’s “Pride Season”: Big Gay Wants YOU!

By HARLEY PRICE

(Editor’s Note: This article is an updated version of one of the 46 essays in Price’s new book, Give Speech a Chance: Heretical Essays on What You Can’t Say or Even Think, available from fgfbooks.com and amazon.)

• + + In Toronto, where I live, June is “Pride Month,” and the fun is already (as the Rodgers and Hammerstein lyric goes) “bustin’ out all over.” Worldwide, late spring and early summer have become the official season of “pride,” when, as Chaucer famously described it in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, the “licour” of universal fecundity commences to course through the sluice-gates of biological nature, and the birds and the bees, reviving from their winter sleep, begin again to “maken melodye.”
  There is something ironic about the fact that the congenitally sterile LGBTQ community has chosen this vernal season of natural and spiritual regeneration to celebrate itself; but then prancing about in nothing but a leather thong would be problematic during a Toronto January.
  Here, as in most progressive cities throughout the democratic West, even elementary schools have by now been ordered by their governments to fly the rainbow flag throughout Pride Season. No doubt the little blighters from kindergarten to grade 6 will be expected to salute the flag from the steps each time they enter and leave the school building, and from the playground whenever they take a break from bullying their gay and transgendered classmates at recess. Let’s hope that some brave young ideological non-conformist takes a knee, and see if the mainstream media fête him in the way they recently heroized Colin Kaepernick.
  Saluting the flag thrice daily hasn’t been enough for the gay patriots, of course. In many schools, as has been widely reported, the entire student body is required, at least once during Pride Month, to assemble around the flag, where they collectively sing anthems to “diversity,” express their solidarity with the homosexual oppressed, or confess their phobias in a twenty-first-century replay of a Maoist struggle session — in reinforcement, that is, of the LGBTQ evangelism and indoctrination that are already the core of the school curriculum.
  Apparently the progressive movement’s noble desiderata of “inclusion,” “respect,” and “safety” don’t extend to the Muslim, Sikh, Orthodox Jewish, and Christian students — or merely the secular remnant of the normal — whenever they are ritually chastised and ridiculed for their retrograde views by their progressive teachers and classmates during such obligatory pro-gay pep rallies.
  (Assuming, that is, that they haven’t already made the prudential calculation that, to be really safe, they need to remain in the closet, as they have been taught to do by the recent admonitory tale of Renfrew, Ontario student Josh Alexander, expelled and arrested for criticizing the policy of his school — a Catholic school, by the way — of allowing anatomical males to use the girls’ bathrooms and showers.)
  By now, the whole dead weight of what the Left used to abominate as “the establishment” has lumbered aboard the Sodomite Bandwagon. In the hebdomadal lead-up to last summer’s Toronto Pride Day festivities — let’s call it homosexual Holy Week — it was impossible not to notice that every government building, hospital, public school, university, major bank, multinational corporation, and retail chain advertised its capitulation to progressive orthodoxy by flying the rainbow flag of cultural surrender. A visitor from a foreign country, as yet unacquainted with Canada’s national emblem, would surely have mistaken the rainbow banner for it, and inferred from its ubiquity that Canadians are the most jingoistic people on Earth.
  Pride Day has become the most sacred day, and the Pride Parade the most sacred rite, of the rolling year for progressives. In the liturgical calendar of the Church of Progress, it combines the Saturnalian self-abandonment of a Brazilian Mardi Gras with the spiritual solemnity of Easter. Ironically, while the so-called religious neutrality of the modern State forbids the display of Christian symbols on Easter and every other day of the year, the anti-Christian banner of gay pride flies uncontroversially over all the departments and offices of Canada’s national, provincial, and municipal governments.
  This in itself demonstrates clearly enough that, in purging Christian symbols and moral traditions from its legislatures and courtrooms in the name of secular pluralism, the Canadian State has hardly absolved itself of the Establishment of Religion; it has merely established an official anti-Christian dogma in its place, which it proselytizes with the same religious zeal, and whose heretics it punishes with the same fanatical ferocity, as any inquisitor or divinely anointed monarch in medieval Christendom.
  Is there anyone alive who is old enough to remember when homosexuality was genuinely dangerous, or even faintly bohemian? The revered leftist homosexual artists and intellectuals of the past — Wilde, Gide, Genet, et al. — might not be entirely sanguine about the fact that homosexual chic today is neither radical nor even countercultural. Indeed, homosexual pride is the culture, as a cursory glance through my treasured copy of the special 96-page-long “Pride Guide” for 2018 makes redundantly clear.
  The Guide’s first few pages are filled with uplifting messages of welcome and solidarity from: the Prime Minister (“beautiful celebration of differences and diversity”. . . “in the face of powerful hatred and intolerance”. . . “better future”…“continue to fight against bigotry and discrimination”. . . “love and respect they deserve”); the Premier of Ontario (“deep respect for and value of diversity”. . . “challenging discrimination”. . . “civil rights and equalities” [sic]. . .“expanding inclusivity”. . . “full mosaic of genders”. . . “equality and empowerment”. . . “confront hatred and intolerance”. . . “express their diversity and joyful love”); and Mayor of Toronto (“diversity of Toronto’s LGBTTIQQ2SA community”. . . “regardless of faith, nationality, skin color, or sexual orientation”. . . “most diverse city in the world”. . . “most inclusive”. . . “everyone is accepted, valued, and celebrated”).
  Surely there is a dedicated Muse, unknown to Hesiod, whose vocation it is to inspire politicians to such Heliconian heights of cant and cliché. Then come official messages of welcome and solidarity (. . . diversity . . . difference . . . equality . . . respect . . . inclusion . . . love . . . hatred . . . intolerance . . . bigotry . . . discrimination) from Pride Toronto’s governmental, union, and corporate sponsors. The list is, shall we say, inclusive: the Ontario Lottery Corporation, Toronto Arts Council, the Royal Ontario Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the CBC, CTV, City TV, Chum FM Radio, GO Transit, Via Rail, Air Canada, TD Bank, Loblaws, Schneider’s, Eska Spring Water, Pinnacle Vodka, Winners, New Balance Footwear, Lyft, Mercedes-Benz, Crest Toothpaste, Pepsi, Bud Light, Calvin Klein, Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
  In the current year (2023), Pride Toronto is proud to announce the retention of all of the above plus the addition of the following new official sponsors: Merk Pharmaceuticals, Smirnoff Vodka, Rogers Cable, Prime Video, Adidas, Manulife Financial, Maple Leaf Foods, The Toronto Maple Leaf Hockey Team, Amazon, Aveeno, Band-Aid, Captain Morgan, Ikea, KitKat, Neutrogena, Sephora, Intuit, Courtyard by Marriott, Sheraton Hotels, Fairmont Hotels, KLM Airlines, and (as one would hope) Trojan Brands, amongst innumerable other Canadian and international commercial behemoths.
  It ought to be difficult to maintain with a straight face (forgive the pun) that you are “oppressed,” “marginalized,” “excluded,” and “discriminated against,” when your alternative lifestyle is officially endorsed and celebrated by the Forbes Top 100 (especially when Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and the rest wouldn’t be caught dead sponsoring a Christian or socially conservative event). So much for the intersectional fable according to which gays are the victims of a heterosexual corporatist power structure, from whose discriminatory depredations they need civil rights protections.
  Wielding the privilege of accusation, the progressive Left has forced normalcy into the recumbent posture of the penitential sinner, permanently suing for absolution for past crimes from its priest-confessors. A longstanding, uncritical enthusiasm for free-market capitalism (for which the present writer admits his guilt) strikes me as a genuine sin for which contrition is long overdue for conservatives.
  At least you can’t say that Pride Toronto doesn’t live up to the progressive ideal of diversity, as promised. At last year’s festivities, every racial, cultural, and ideological hue and tincture (within the gay rainbow spectrum, that is) was represented: Indigenous Pride, Disabled Pride, Latino Lesbians, Gay Black Lives Matter, the gay chapters of Antifa and Occupy Wall Street, Queers against Global Warming, Gays for Gaia (one of whose signs read, “Pipelines are Hetero-Phallic Symbols”), Trans Against GMOs (notwithstanding the fact that both — the trans and the food — are genetically modified). And look how well they all got along — disabled gays with able-bodied gays, gays with lesbians, lesbians and gays with bi’s, lesbians, gays, and bi’s with trans, binary trans with non-binary trans, two-spirited with one-spirited, questioning Sodomites with dogmatic Sodomites — an example of tolerance and mutual respect for us all! Diversity? “Here,” as Dryden remarked of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, “is God’s plenty.”
  Of course, one looks in vain for such organizations as Dykes for Border Walls, Questioners of Big Government and High Taxes, or Queers for Religious Liberty. Remember, this is “diversity” as progressives define it: every shade and permutation of progressive group-think.