Shame

This weekend I was in Portland, Maine. Portland’s “PRIDE” parade was held on Saturday. My topline summary: PRIDE has become a catch-all for our culture’s outcasts and losers. If I were an L, a G, or a B, I would be downright resentful of my movement’s colonization by those who are weird and/or unattractive, sometimes because of their own choices.

Let me tell you what I saw on the streets of Portland a few hours after the parade had officially ended. I don’t have any photographic evidence of what I saw, so feel free to trust me, or don’t. The image above is a file photo. To me it would feel like a violation of other citizens’ privacy to photograph them. Because my point here (SPOILER ALERT!) is that people should keep more of their interests and activities private, it would also seem to be voyeuristic and hypocritical to publish photos.

​First, the evidence on display in Portland shows that the LGBTQIA2S+++++ “community” has been thoroughly infiltrated by straight couples. The majority of marchers and stragglers that I saw were male-female couples, either hand-in-hand young people or young partnered/married types pushing baby strollers and/or walking around with multiple children in tow. Because of my next two points, you may wonder, as I did, why anyone would bring children to this event.

​Second, the majority of these straight couples and other attendees were fat to morbidly obese. Where I live, it is very strange to see so many young people (under 35 or so) who are fat. Not only fat adults, but many of these obese straight couples had chubby to very fat children in tow. Beyond the obesity, the adults and teens went out of their way to present themselves as ugly: they wore torn clothing and stockings, bad makeup, strategically ungroomed hair. These are the signifiers of poor mental health common among the homeless and drug-addicted population of our cities. It is shocking to me that so many who (presumably) aren’t afflicted by these problems want to look as if they are.

​Third, I saw evidence of furry culture in this PRIDE event—just a glimpse, but I think a highly revealing one. I went into a restaurant in downtown Portland for an early supper. When I entered, there was a table for two just leaving—it appeared to be a young girl (late teens) and her mother. The teenager was wearing a furry costume, and as she left the restaurant, she popped on the tail, furry paw-spats and gloves, and the doghead. Her mother was wearing a t-shirt that said something like “furry mom/free hugs.”

(Aside: here’s a question for other Generation X-parents of generation Z-kids out there: can you imagine going to a PRIDE event or an ACT-UP demonstration in the 1980s or early 1990s with your mommies? I was so embarrassed for this woman and her daughter, who is probably autistic or has some other emotional or developmental delays. Perhaps the mother has autism too—who knows? Whatever happened to privacy and boundaries within families? Do parents now really want to know so much about their children’s sexual fetishes and porn-influenced tastes?)

​My summary thoughts are these. First, there in the front corner of that little restaurant in Portland, Maine seemed to be the key to understanding everything that has gone wrong with our culture’s relationship to gender and sexuality in the past fifteen years: the inversion of authority from parents to children; the inability of adults to sort out adult interests from children’s interests; the absolute loss of everyone’s innocence (or at least strategic ignorance) about other people’s fetishes and weird sex lives.

​Second, I think what I saw in Portland, Maine this weekend is strong evidence that TQ+ identities are quickly falling from high status to low status. We know that obesity is now a disease or condition of poverty, and that wealthy and middle-class people will work very hard—waking up at 5 or 6 a.m. to work out—and spend lots of money on gyms and Ozempic to stay fit. If low-status (poor and/or fat) kids have fully gone in for the TQ+, then that means that the high-status kids will abandon this cult like rats abandoning a sinking ship. Considering the grooming and hygiene problems I saw, my suspicion is that TQ+ identities are now just being folded into a whole raft of mental illnesses that seem fun and performative on TikTok but are evidence of a disturbed mind IRL.

I have mixed feelings about this: on one hand, it will be good if leaders/popular kids aren’t serving as role models with the influence to draw more kids into this cult. On the other hand, what will poorer and lower-status families do when the parade marches on and leaves their children potentially sterilized, breastless, or castrated by physicians, guided by therapists, who assured them that transition was the only cure for a situational depression?

I saw nothing to be proud of, Portland. It was all shameful. All I felt was shame. All I could see was shame foretold.