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Desperation as Inspiration
is So Common.
Artis (the Spoonman)
PRIDE
by Dan Savage
For a group of people long labeled sinners —
and understandably sensitive to the charge,
which is still made — it's more than a little
ironic that gays and lesbians should select a
sin as our annual rallying cry. And it's not
just any sin but the sin Pope Gregory the Great
called "the queen of them all."
An early Christian monk, Evagrius of Pontus,
made a list of "wicked human passions," of
which he determined there were eight. He listed
them in ascending order of all-around
wickedness: gluttony, lust, greed, sadness,
anger, sloth, vainglory, and pride. In the
sixth century. Pope Gregory the Great took
Evagrius' list and cut it down to seven,
combining some (sloth and sadness, vainglory
and pride), and adding a brand new sin, envy.
Gregory's revised list — pride, envy, anger,
sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust — were known
to his contemporaries as the Seven Capital
Vices. We call them the Seven Deadly Sins. In
the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas chimed in,
observing that before a person could lust like
a weasel or go green with envy, he first had to
commit the sin of pride. This made pride not
only the deadliest of sins, but "the beginning
of all sin."
Gays and lesbians embraced the sin of pride 30
years ago to combat something that was, at the
time, a much deadlier problem for queers than
any of Evagrius' wicked passions or Greg's
capital vices: shame. Webster's defines shame
as "a condition of humiliating disgrace or
disrepute," and until the late '60s, shame was
a poison that killed queers. And straights
weren't the only ones who viewed homosexuality
as disgraceful — most gays and lesbians did
too. Shame kept us closeted and fearful, made
our oppression possible, and led some of us to
write very bad plays and wear too-tight
trousers. Clearly, strong medicine was needed.
We searched for an antidote that would purge us
of this poison, and found it in pride.
If it took a deadly sin to undo the damage done
by shame — a condition imposed on us, not
something we did to ourselves — surely Eva,
Greg, pnd Thom would understand. Webster's
defines pride as "inordinate self-esteem," or
"a reasonable and justifiable self-respect."
Whether inordinate or justifiable, pride was an
effective antidote: as more gays and lesbians
committed the sin of pride, fewer were
victimized by shame. We became less closeted
and less fearful, making it increasingly
difficult to oppress us, and we started writing
better plays and wearing more comfortable
clothing.
But 30 years after the antidote arrived — in
the form of a riot and an annual parade to
commemorate that riot — gays and lesbians stand
in renewed danger of being poisoned. The poison
threatening us now isn't shame, however, it's
pride. In medical terms, once the antidote
cures you, you're supposed to stop taking it.
Why? The funny thing about antidotes is that
they're often toxic, and if taken too long,
they can kill you just as surely as the
original poison. Even Tylenol, the antidote for
hangovers, is deadly if you take too much.
Pride isn't killing anyone — not yet, anyway —
but the fwap of rainbow windsocks is definitely
making us dull and slow, and leading to a
resurgence of bad plays and tight pants.
Surrounding oneself with constant reminders to
feel prideful — rainbow flags, freedom rings,
"family" bumper stickers, pink triangle
tattoos, "freedom tumblers," rainbow-striped
dog collars (!) — is to constantly be reminded
of shame. The only way to be truly and finally
free of stultifying shame is to break free of
equally stultifying (if better accessorized)
pride. Instead, American gays and lesbians act
like cancer patients who, having been cured,
remind themselves that they aren't sick anymore
by dropping by the hospital every once in a
while for a little chemotherapy.
Of course, all gay or lesbian people have to
struggle with shame prior to and during their
coming out. Simple pride in being gay or
lesbian — simple-minded pride, 1 should say —
is useful, but should be thought of as a stage
young queers must pass through, like puberty,
and not an ecstatic state all queers must live
in, like Ohio. (When I say "young and gay" I'm
(Continued on Page 5)
W A S H I N G T O N ft O R E G O N C O A S T S
199 9 Corrected for PACIFIC BEACHES
HIGH AUGUST " j T O W AUGUST
DATE
DAI
Baby Gramps at the Oregon Country Fair *
* You can also catch Gramps at 5PM Sunday at Vernonia Days
August 6th through 8th in, you guessed it, beautiful
downtown Vernonia, Oregon.
All’s Fair
Well, we got back from the Thirtieth Annual Oregon
Country Fait and folks have been asking how it was.
“Did you have fun?” Yes. “Were there lots of
nekkid folks?” Yes. “Is it really drug and alcohol
free?" No. Nothing is free. Stumblefoot came and
got me in his new/old Dodge Dakota. (I’m sure he
bought it just for the name.) For those of you who
don’t know Stumblefoot, he is a spiritual consultant
(medicine man) in the Rastified Church of the
Cowboy Buddha, and attends vespers at Bill’s semi-
regularly, and is a member and host of good standing
in the Thanatopis Literary and Inside Straight
Association’s Tuesday night Potlatches. He is also a
regular visitor to the Nevada Test Site and walks his
talk; except when after one or two too many barley
pops he becomes Sasquach, but that’s another story.
We headed down the coast under a rare blue July
sky, stopping only for used bookstores and Smoked
Salmon at the Siletz store in Depoe Bay. We stopped
at the Alpha-bit cafe in Mapleton for some lunch and
a few choice paperbacks, and left them Sally’s and
Michael’s books to show the buyer, (Yes, this was in
fact a business trip, and by golly I think that it might
be tax deductible. I love America.) then we popped
into the grocery store for a couple of cases of Bud, a
carton of Camels, and lots of Ice. We were ready. We
got to the site, and after the usual hour or so of
standing in lines of undeniably individualistic looking
folks, and proving our worthiness, and documenting
our credibility, we were safely parked and wristbanded,
and blessed in the eyes of the powers that be. I set up
my humble wickiup in the camp of the tribe from
Duvall. Miss Paula, Russell, Wendy, and assorted folks
of various ages. Miss Paula, Russell and Wendy have
been coming to the Fair for decades Wendy makes
hats, and nice light cotton dresses and other stuff, and
she says she’s becoming a computer animator. She is
a nice smart woman with a very smart son, who reads
almost as much as your beloved Rev. Russell is a tall
skinny, longhaired logger. He builds bird houses and
bat houses out of cedar scrap. He is the kind of
logger who asks forgiveness from every tree he cuts. I
think he is a logger because he thinks that it is better if
he cuts down a tree than if someone who doesn’t
understand trees does. Yes, it is strange. Miss Paula is
of course the reason I stay there I’ve known Miss
Paula since ought seventy something, and was once a
sharecropper, with Dirty Ernie (Johnnie Ward) on her
Ferns of Mystery Slug Ranch in Duvall, Washington
It was there that I cut up my driver’s license, it was
there that I began the Rastified Church of the Cowboy
Buddha. She works at the bookstore in Duvall, and
makes toys. Well, toys is a pretty small word for what
she makes. She hand sews velvets and laces and beads
and makes animals, teddy bears riding ponies, dressed
in buckskins, tigers dressed for the Court of Ixtuis
XIV, giraffes in lace Victorian dresses, yes, wondrous
‘toys’. It should go without saying that her work sells
high and fast. They are a pleasant tritx: to camp with.
The thing about the Fair is its contradictions The
Fair started in ‘69 as the Renaissance Faire, and was a
benefit for a pre-school or something, but the deal was
a bunch of hippies got together in the woods by a
creek, played music, sold food and art and dope to
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BIGGER TH E DOT - BE TTER
DAYLIGHT TIME
BOLD TYPE
I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot
Horace Greeley
*
I was at the Country Fair, and they have this shrine,
that is a sort of all purpose prayer place. There are
statues of Buddha, Vishnu, Jesus, holy objects from
Native American, Jewish, pagan, and other belief
systems, all together on a low table with a pillow in
front to kneel on. There is a pad of paper and ball­
point pens to write your prayer and pu, it in a small
bowl on the altar I am prone, given the opportunity,
to pray for peace, so I respectfully took off my Cubs
hat, knelt on the pillow and wrote a prayer for peace
on the pad, folded it, put it in the bowl and with a little
groaning and cracking of bones, got up to leave
"Excuse me, sir," said a young woman. I looked back
at her and she was pointing at the pillow. There was
my Cubs hat, its bill pointed directly at the shrine, and
as I stood there, I could almost hear it praying, "Please
Buddha, just some solid pitching Jesus, is it too much
to ask to make the play-offs? God, it's been ninety
years since we made the Series, and it's going to take a
miracle." I stood there looking at the little blue
baseball cap with its bright red "C", and wondered if
either of our prayers had a chance. I bent and with a
little embarrassment, picked up my hat 1 bought this
hat at HoHoKam Field where the Cubs play their
Spring Training Home games. I've lost it three times
and it has returned every tune I'm not saying it is
magic, but well, I've never seen a baseball hat pray
before, but if any hat was going to pray, it seems likely
it would be a Cubs hat So, the next time I pray for
Peace, I'm going to tip my hat respectfully, and throw
in a little prayer for some pitching It couldn't hurt.
UTFEK. LEFT EDGE »UGüST m