In Defense of Pride _ A Queer Directive
In Defense of Pride _ A Queer Directive
by Robert Steven Prattico
I feel today as I felt then that there is a service to the good in bringing even painful and garbled truth of the nature of our thought and feeling to the light of print, for what I only feel as an urgency and many men may condemn me for as an aberration, some man reading may render as an understanding and bring into the wholeness of human experience.
- Robert Duncan, “The Homosexual in Society”(1944)
I. How Can This Be a Parade?
We doll up and take place in line,
defined by the same estrangement,
fuck-pent adolescent men set free
into a land of non-verbal language
with straight-faced incompatibility.
.
One after the other after the other,
as if we want our faces in pictures
on billboards and porn site covers,
we get distracted by a drunk vanity
and run off track because there are no
clearly marked paths to turn down.
.
I’ve seen men sleep with mirrors,
their eyes closed groping themselves – or
if not reflection, in a body proportionate.
I’ve seen men betray themselves and fuck
the opposite, but arrows don’t seem to relate
because footprints left are all but straight.
.
Sexual paradox ceases to be
when it becomes routine,
merely erect behind a screen.
barring eye contact and fog steam.
Evenings fail without strobe lights
and exaggerated drag queens
and I am old enough to
remember there being a scene -
today, we seem far less free;
just factory beds in row, each taking
turns in line, each for a convenient thrill
(hardly and not parallel to the old world
where gay men would emerge
undress and release themselves
in search of genuine sexual identity),
an assembly line of rote swipe right,
no more than an electronic means of production -
and how can this be celebrated in parade?
.
… so I answer (humbly) in the present tense,
with voices I’ve read from men in the past,
how can internet acquaintance be what there is
when I am seeing a proud 35 year old visage
reflect off my actual face in mirrors?
There is no slight of hand, no edits,
no filters, no sweet falsehoods to share
when my heart beat is actually heard –
Since when have we become sent pictures?
My eyes were born with sweat before daylight,
you see, built to withstand hate and oversight,
eyes not unlike the rest of our invisible minority;
a quality no cache of images will let you see.
.
We are born with opportunity
to destroy expectations of ‘supposed to be,’
and to draw our own roadmaps,
with no conventional guide or survey.
It is for our strength to stand out bold,
often alone, and survive that we have pride.
Applications have stripped actual community,
profiles, pictures, and stats are sole commodities,
and their imminent utility dilutes conversation -
shelves of potentials on screens become evenings,
there is hardly a moment to blink in between,
let alone see the privilege of collective identity.
There is much to be said for natural gathering
and the spectral experience of in person bodies,
yet we march our thumbs across touch screens.
.
Sex, for us, has always been procreative,
measured by the extent we go to get it.
Our underground secretly carved art
left little trace records for history –
but transformed the public into private
by forcing us to crack a light in the dark.
Now stored data is all we have to give, so
we have lost the need to be imaginative.
II. How Can This Be Deleted?
‘Upon first listen, don’t conclude,
invite it in like a slow introduction.’
‘You don’t have to tell me, I know.
I’ve waited and listened for subtle layers,
small vibrations found within orchestration,
given in return, an allowance to grow
inverted and off to the side.’
Unimpeded mystical sunlight crawls
past canopies onto a different path
and shines onto warm untrodden grass,
where it is open, harmless, and natural.
These obscure trails, seen only by fearless feet
careful not to press weight onto delicate leaves,
lead to an alcove of art in discreet offering.
New and lost triggers for eye-opening
against a background of mature sincerity
and a capacity for acting on tendency.
‘How long will words remain silent sentences
before they have pleasure to say what they mean?’
...they’d ask… in lines written to be treasure.
I can’t help but move, from my sleeve, these pages
deep into my pockets; dried ink covered feeling
disallowed fresh air, reason, talk, and admitting
for fear of being diluted by all else –
so to preserve the urge to bridge lips with gravity,
(unnoticed by classical music before sleep)
I compose my own humble words in effigy.
The art of underground seduction may be lost
to our current obsession with the delete key,
but not to me and my attempt at writing.
For the desire subjected to tired backrooms,
airport layovers, forests trails, and hotels;
for locked eyes and a gentle nod to follow,
for the candor of being with a transient stranger,
for where our identity materializes easier,
for the ocean floor with all its sunken treasure –
I pay respect and listen for vibration in layers,
and when home, write to preserve its nature.
III. How Can This Be Forgotten?
Spectral homo-frequencies of men passed,
like radio ghosts or prophets, cruise within us.
If you look past yourself, you can sense them
descend from clouds to form thick roots.
They return to give us focus, tricks, keys
backstory, coterie, a sense of style, purpose
and the means for which to base celebrating.
These men (dead heroes deemed faggot, having
thrown bricks in riot, wared an ignored virus and
devised ways to escape suicide-locked closets;
that despite destructive tendency to be separate,
spoke up in defense against moral attack)
return today to witness the world as a result -
and instead of dancing, they are whispering.
I feel a brush beside me, invisible as warm
breath, dressed shirtless, in leather chaps or
high heals, unannounced, damp in my ears;
the alluring scent and thrill of strangers
appearing as yellow-painted streetlight mist.
I see it in the aged photographs of sailors,
flipping pages in their blacklist journals.
I taste it left behind in mornings unfulfilled,
but mostly, I hear it in the beat of ballads.
We are censoring ourselves and our history
by not understanding what it was like to be them,
robbing ourselves of opportunity and affirmation
by not exploring the troves left for our education.
I know creativity in struggle is more interesting,
for now we’ve got it high-speed, clickable, and boring,
and they relied on hot implicit body signaling.
We forget and take for granted that we can touch
each other in public, outside of under tables,
or that we can pose and post our skin at will, and
if necessary, file complaint for civil protection.
Forgive me if I am dressed in awestruck adoration
when captured by their courage and haunting seduction.
I feel communal in respecting their aged identity, and
under them, I feel authentic and more human.
IV. How Can This Be Tolerance?
Sometimes we look to stand under trees
surrounded by our childhood and memory
only to find them mulch, cut blind, shred
like paper, on the ground, left behind –
byproducts and remnants of our disclosure.
Coming out hardly means we don’t need cover,
shielding from glares of permissible slander.
We broke the medicine model,
drew our own wheel, and now
we are trendy dinner conversation -
not sick anymore, but progressive.
“My cousin has a friend who is gay,”
somehow makes it ok, more decent;
but speak vulgar vocabulary,
the common fucking tongue even,
and you will feel how easily it isn’t –
telling them what they want to hear,
not the whole self you want to share.
And once the love that dare not speak
except in muted measure of heartbeat,
can now saunter shameless in streets –
you’d think this would engender solidarity
or at least a capacity to communicate
and dress among us a shared empathy. But our
untucked bitch brunches, hungover excuses
to be caty, to share what-skank-did-who stories,
fail to live up to camp models of expectation.
I imagine better things to do with privilege
than shade, scandal, and a face disinterested.
Whether shirts or skins, a fairy outside or in,
from straight judgment or from side to side,
we dodge insolence from our team and theirs,
sometimes wandering off to seek old trees,
covering from tacit prejudice or how we should be.
“Good queers don’t get mad.” “You are overreacting.”
Let yourself be angry
V. In Defense of Pride: A Queer Directive
.
But perhaps I am wrong,
or I think too much,
I do have a vicious tendency
to view things separately.
Perhaps a parade posted is better
than no parade at all, and perhaps
backstory vintage sex should rest.
Perhaps wireless app trending
has in fact ignited network possibility,
and perhaps we are better off today.
Who am I to say ? other than
to blow questions in play
that could become conversation
or queer directive.
.
I seek to present the virtues and joy of being gay,
to defend the historic grassroots, unique to us
lost, ignored, quiet and misplaced today
that we cannot afford now to delete or forget.
Immutability is a fixed quality, uncontrolled,
given to a particular caliber, carved in stone; and
we’ve spent centuries cold to avoid chariots of blame
who claim we are crime against human nature.
Just to be is a weight to override an adversary,
defensive living, forced into counter argument,
an inherent rebellion resulting from being labeled out.
.
But with no model sculptures upon which to mold
ourselves, we are given by our very seed the ability
to create meaning out of our own honesty,
to chisel the choices of our body as we please
next to whomever we deem stark or sterling.
Our definition escaped underneath something warm,
safe from conventional expectations of wrong –
thus bear, butch, twink, jock, circuit, lipstick,
otter, bulldog, lezzie, fairy, drag queen were born;
and the colored list of self-imagined creation goes on.
.
Being born inverted gives us something in common,
and of all the conflicts spewing from putrid sources
over our vulnerable, clearly separate, naked bodies,
we share the same struggle of accepting orientation
that can’t help be antithetical and counter to plurality.
.
And yet, out of a desolate feeling of fault and error
we have endured a two-front conflict of poison –
not only from a off-beat rhythm or from time buried
in closets, but also from horizontal slights, surprisingly
from those also gay bearing identical experience as kin –
hostility from hetero-society for being unnatural
and hostility from homo-brethren for being human,
both acting with an uptight attitude superior in position.
.
Admittedly, we each must agree collectively that
we have felt at one time treated different, for under
the varying shade of prejudice, fighting is impartial;
and in that feeling, overcoming conflict with equal
devotion to freedom, aspiration and love,
that we all share the same caged heartbeat –
but with scissors, strobe, shoes and a sequin sheet,
our rhythm pulses original style we’ve exaggerated.
.
The point of departure for pride was a protest,
three days of rioting against betrayal of public trust,
igniting a torch to be passed around a covered nation
screaming to every god-fearing zealot or mountain bigot
“we don’t wear underwear, we show our pubic hair.”
For decades we were a phalanx of grassroots activism,
ejaculating sexual revolution and surviving a plague -
we demanded change and made a vow against silence.
But continued violence, discrimination, and intolerance
today begs the question, under the glaze of lit parade,
how is it we have stopped protesting, acting up in coalition?
.
Our experience, often disguised,
can arise from mystical sources,
and out of sincere concern
for what should not be forgotten,
I join the fight for gay power,
and in true fashion, stand in my own rebellion.
You, as an alive, functioning, loving queer,
are a living revolution. Be proud. Shout.
Next year, we march naked.
.
RSP © 2016