The Implosion of Boston’s Pride Parade Is a Sign of Things to Come
"Boston Pride is one of the oldest gay-rights organizations in the United States, with its first parade having taken place in 1971... Boston Pride celebrated a half-century-plus of existence by collapsing into social panic and cancelling itself. I mean this literally: Boston Pride no longer exists...
The seeds of Boston Pride’s self-destruction were sown in June 2015—ironically, just weeks before the US Supreme Court released its decision in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which required all states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. (Massachusetts had already legalized gay marriage in 2004.) On June 13th, about a dozen Black Lives Matter activists managed to halt Boston’s annual Pride parade for 11 minutes—one minute for each transgender person that had been murdered that year...
The activists resented the idea of a Pride parade that included any constituency, LGBT or otherwise, connected to Republican politics, law enforcement, the military, or Israel.
But all of these controversies paled compared to the one that developed in 2020, following the death of George Floyd in May, when Boston Pride released a pro-BLM statement that had been watered down from the original draft that had been prepared by the group’s communications team...
When board members refused to resign en masse so that they could be replaced by a more “inclusive” slate, about 80 percent of Pride’s volunteers resigned in protest, along with the chairs of the Black Pride and Latinx Pride subcommittees. In a new statement released under the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, the board asked for forgiveness and promised to hold themselves accountable...
But activists weren’t satisfied, and the board was pressured to make more concessions—including the shelving of nearly all virtual Pride events in favor of “Events that Support the Black and Brown Community.” But by this time, it seemed no gesture of apology or appeasement would suffice. And some former volunteers set up a rival group called Pride 4 The People as a vehicle to organize boycotts. A group of transgender activists also started a separate group called Trans Resistance MA to “advocat[e] for the safety, joy, and liberation of TQBIPOC” (this term being identical to “QTBIPOC,” except with the Q and T pointedly reversed). Together, these groups put on a “Trans Resistance March and Vigil for Black Trans Lives” as an alternative to the cancelled Pride parade. But in contrast to the celebratory, upbeat mood that generally characterizes Pride, the March and Vigil were somber and somewhat morbid.
The organizers even issued a set of special instructions for any “white person planning to attend the event.”...
By mid-June, 2020, activists were insisting that there was no other solution except for the Pride board to completely surrender control of the organization to their activist critics. They blasted the board for its “white-centeredness” and for being “trans-exclusionary.”...
Boston Pride announced the details of its grand transformation, which included the declaration that it now would be prioritizing “the representation of Queer, Transgender/Gender non-binary, Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other people of color.” Boston Pride also announced new positions on its board, as well as new committees to staff. Pride 4 The People and Trans Resistance MA, however, dismissed this as a “faux-transformation,” and instructed supporters to boycott the new board seats... this led to a bizarre standoff that went on for months: On the one hand, activists said they wouldn’t participate in the board’s allegedly insincere reform effort until these same activists occupied a majority of the board positions. On the other hand, they couldn’t occupy any board positions—let alone a majority—until they ended the boycott...
In apparent atonement for its perceived sins following Floyd’s death, Boston Pride’s board released a statement that systematically name-checked every possible activist slogan and talking point...
The memo represented a complete ideological surrender to board critics who’d sought to reimagine Pride as an explicitly anti-racist social-justice organization that prioritizes the demands of trans people—black transwomen, in particular—over other members of the LGBT community. The board members also took the extra step of humiliating themselves by noting that they were under the close oversight of minders who might slap them down if they went off-script.
Not surprisingly, the 2021 iteration of Pride month was a dud in Boston, with almost all the June events being either cancelled or boycotted...
Boston Pride is no more, New England’s largest LGBT parade is in limbo, and whatever leadership emerges to fill the void will, in all likelihood, assume a posture that is more radical, more shrill, and more off-putting to the general public.
In any political movement, activists face an existential question: what do we do if we win? Most never have to answer that question, because winning is hard, especially when you have lofty goals—or, in some cases, nebulous or unattainable ones—Save the Planet! Demand Justice Now! But in the case of gay rights, the goals from the beginning were pretty specific, and the legal victories achieved in the last 20 years have been swift and comprehensive ...
Since Obergefell, Pride organizations in many parts of North America have been flush with cash and political influence, but not quite sure what to do with it. In Boston, as in other cities, Pride has fractured into several camps. One is made up of those who are happy to see Pride become a blander, more corporate, mass participation institution within America’s ever-expanding civic calendar. The second major bloc is made up of those who seek radicalism for its own sake, and who are desperate to rekindle what they see as the revolutionary origins of Pride. And so if gay rights is no longer radical, they insist, the LGBT movement must pour its energy and resources into causes that offer the possibility of militant politics—such as radical gender movements, the erasure of biological sex, anti-capitalism, demonization of Israel, extreme forms of “anti-racism,” pacifism, and police abolition. Even gays and lesbians, now seen as the “privileged” elite of the LGBT population, are the subject of suspicion, and even animosity.
This affected radicalism is totally unmoored from the reality that the LGBT movement has achieved nearly all of its goals. Even in regard to the nominally radical causes these activists tend to embrace, the conceit of being brave and revolutionary is quite thin, since it turns out that many of these same causes are actively supported by progressive politicians, academics, major cultural institutions, Hollywood, and even “woke” corporations. Activists who tell themselves that they’re raging against the machine have, in many cases, become the machine."
On the "myth" of the slippery slope
SJWs want to destroy everything, so even capitulating to their every demand is not enough