Involving children in Pride events temporarily allows sexual revolutionaries to have their cake and eat it, too.
Involving children temporarily allows sexual revolutionaries to have their cake and eat it, too.
S o far, at this year’s Pride parades, we’ve seen partial nudity, twerking, packets of lube tossed from floats, men in fetish and animal costumes whipping one another, and signs promoting “sex work.” In 2022, none of this is particularly shocking. What remains controversial, however, is that in each instance children were present.
A condition of equality is that you’re treated the same as everyone else. However, one of the central dilemmas of the LGBTQ+ movement is that the aim of equality has already been achieved. The revolutionaries want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to be accepted as normal but continue to be recognized as provocative and in-your-face. Involving children allows them to have it both ways.
Justin Myers, writing in GQ, argues that “there’s nothing at Pride that children shouldn’t see.” He claims that “childhood innocence is a myth that only protects parents from explanations — nothing more.” Never mind that child psychiatrists have long recognized the harm early exposure to sexual content can have on a child’s development.
Most Americans are comfortable with homosexuality and supportive of gay marriage. And yet, as recent polling indicates, many American parents are uncomfortable with exposing their school-aged children to LGBT ideology. That’s because there is something obviously inappropriate in instructing impressionable, developing minds in adult ideas and practices. Even Bill Maher recently described the massive increase in LGBT-identifying youth as a contagion — one to be especially wary of when life-altering drugs and surgeries are involved.
Some LGBT-identifying adults are indifferent to the involvement of children in Pride. “If I want to wear a jockstrap and a harness and a pup hood, I’m going to do so,” a man calling himself “Pup Champ” told the LGBT website Pink News. “If parents want to bring their kids to a pride event, they can educate their children on what they are experiencing, wait until those children are old enough to make informed decisions for themselves, or stick to the family/kid safe event.”
But the founders of Pride realized the political benefits of younger recruits. After the 1969 Stonewall uprising, the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations (ERCHO) voted for a national annual demonstration “to be more relevant, reach a greater number of people, and encompass the ideas and ideals of the larger struggle.” Therefore, it was ordained that the demonstration would have “no dress or age regulations.” They were on to something: 21 percent of Gen Z adults identify as LGBT compared with 10.5 percent of Millennials, 4.2 percent of Generation Z, and 2.6 percent of Baby Boomers.
Camille Paglia has argued that the absence of taboos decreases a culture’s capacity for eroticism. In the 19th century, flashing a bit of ankle was wildly suggestive. But in 2022, when the prevailing sexual ethic is “anything goes,” Christina Aguilera performing at LA Pride wearing a strap-on dildo was more banal than sexy.
One fetishist, whose day job is teaching children, told Pink News: “When I’m at events, people know who I am and I’m happy to interact, but I’m scared to put anything online. I suppose it’s the thought that teachers’ standards outline anything that may bring the profession into disrepute. It’s not illegal nor a safeguarding issue, but I imagine it to be frowned upon.”
But isn’t that the point? The pretense here is that it would be liberating for the teaching profession to be proudly pro-fetishist. But were this to be achieved, fetishism would lose its “sizzle,” as Paglia puts it. Nevertheless, blurring the boundaries between professional and private, or the boundaries between adults and children, appears to be a growing pursuit in the movement.
Witness the trend of LGBT-identifying teachers coming out to kids, then sharing details of their confessions on TikTok. Ostensibly, this is a new frontier in the battle for normality, but a battle that’s already been resolved. For decades, teachers (whatever their sexual preference) have answered pupils’ questions about their private lives with “That’s none of your business; get on with your work.”
There were critics within the gay-rights movement who warned that gay marriage was too conservative an idea, that their movement ought to be revolutionary. Similar warnings have been aired about drag-queen story hour: The concern among such critics is not that it’s harmful to kids, but that it’s harmful to drag. After all, what’s less subversive than a bunch of white middle-class moms hoping to boost their woke credentials?