Flying Oskar: Pride Postmortem

I’ve written about this past weekend’s Upstate Pride march and festival in some form or fashion three out of my last four columns, each time taking a different angle, trying in my own way to capture the enormity of what all the events of this past month mean for my hometown. Likely as not, I failed in that task. Nothing anyone can say or write can really encompass what has happened here in Spartanburg. That’s partly because nobody can really know yet, but it’s also because meaning is a terribly tricky thing, prone to all sorts of biases making it so subjective that some may wonder if it’s even worth it to try to attach meaning to something this large at all.

And, to be frank, some meanings are just plain more important than others.

For example, my own selfish desire to ascribe some sort of over-arching progressive meaning to the stunning success of Saturday’s march should take a backseat to the deeply personal meaning for Spartanburg’s LGBT community. I can’t help but hope that there were high-school kids out there, struggling under a weight that I can’t imagine, who found strength in the pictures and video from local media. My hope is that those young people will look at those pictures and know that they are not alone, that they don’t have to hate themselves anymore.

Progress like that doesn’t lend itself to statistics, but it helps heal the soul of our community, leaving us all a little bit better today than we were yesterday.

While not as important, the events of this past month do have a larger context though. There’s a big picture out there to be discussed, and while I’m not going to pretend to be an authority on what that picture looks like, I do have a few ideas.

First, if anyone doubted it before, they can’t deny now that there is a robust and lively LGBT rights movement in Spartanburg, and that movement is about a lot more than just festivals and marches. It’s about equality. The stronger that movement becomes, the stronger the resistance is likely to become. Today it’s an idiotic councilwoman making specious comparisons between civil rights and LGBT rights. Tomorrow it will be organized opposition to a push to extend benefits to the same-sex partners of city employees. Today it’s 70 or 80 protesters holding a rather pathetic hate-fest, trying desperately to cover that hatred with a veneer of “Christian love.” Tomorrow it will be mayoral and city council candidates running their campaigns specifically against the “homosexual agenda.”

whether we realize it or not, we have fired the opening salvo in the first great progressive battle in Spartanburg’s 21st century, and while I have no doubt that we are on the right side of history, none of us should be surprised when the other side doesn’t go quietly into that good night. Some can be reasoned with. Some will gradually come to see the futility of their bigotry, but others will only stiffen in their opposition. They will carry their hatreds with them to the grave, just as their ideological predecessors carried theirs. Until their homophobia is made obsolete by our natural progress towards a community where LGBT people are truly equal, we’ll have to drag them kicking and screaming all the way.

What’s been started here won’t be undone either. If you’re not ready to stand up and fight for our LGBT friends in Spartanburg, you’d better be ready to step out of the way, because in my estimation that train has left the station, and I’d be surprised if it shows any signs of slowing down anytime soon.

I know there’s been a tendency among some to want to move our community forward by consensus, embracing change only when it can be accomplished without conflict, without drawing lines of division. I’ve never been one of those people, but I understand the tendency. It would be wonderful if we could make omelets without breaking eggs, but we can’t, and many of the more meaningful things Spartanburg can and should be moving towards aren’t going to sail through on the wings of consensus. They will have to be fought for every inch of the way. Nothing illustrates that point better than the past month since Mayor White’s proclamation was first announced.

Which brings me to my second point: We already have people in high places willing to stand up and do what’s right. Those brave officials take those stands regardless of the fact that they have almost nothing to gain, from a practical point of view, by doing so.

Mayor White in particular has been incredible throughout these last few weeks, never wavering in his support for Upstate Pride. That support culminated in one of the most stirring speeches I’ve ever heard by a local official. Junie White walked on the stage at Saturday’s event and took a stand for equality, a stand he took without equivocation and without calculation. Mayor White simply did what was right, and defended that decision with the simple, matter-of-fact tone that has become his hallmark. “There are two reasons that I issued this proclamation: you asked for it, and you’re entitled to it,” the mayor told us. It’s a line I won’t soon forget. That line tells us a lot about the character of the man we elected mayor, a man who, according to people who know him personally, was worried that the controversy over his proclamation would overshadow the LGBT community’s day in the sun. If I knew nothing else about him, that alone would be enough to make Junie White a great man, and a great mayor, in my eyes.

It’s not just Mayor White either. Just as vocal in all this, have been Council members Cate Ryba and Renee Cariveau. The three of them have been steadfast in their support for Upstate Pride, and they deserve our support in return. The next time you hear somebody running down the local government, remind them of the great service Junie White, Cate Ryba, and Renee Cariveau have done for our community in standing up for equality.

Ultimately, I think Saturday’s march and festival was a glimpse of the path that Spartanburg is on, and from the looks of things, that path is going to be a joyous one in many ways.

Speaking as someone who attended both the march and the protest against it the day before, I was struck by how different the tone was between the two. Friday’s anti-Pride protest was dour and negative, with contorted faces and pitiable ignorance both appearing in spades. There was no joy, and though they used the word more times than I could count, there was no love either. What I saw there was hate dressed in the garb of religious piety. I saw a group of people convinced of their monopoly on morality. I saw a group of people whose ideas about the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind only extend as far as their own prejudices allow, prejudices I suspect they hold much more for personal, rather than religious, reasons. They spoke often about God’s law, but the hate they feel doesn’t come from God or his law; it comes from inside.

Saturday was almost the exact opposite. There was laughter, smiles, and celebration almost everywhere I looked. We were a band of 1,500 happy warriors marching towards the future and partying all the way. To me, it felt as though there was a certain momentum in the air, a magnetism pulling us all towards a goal that once might have seemed unobtainable but now seems inevitable. If last year’s march was the Spartanburg LGBT community’s “coming out,” then this year’s march was that community kicking open the door to the chamber of power and demanding a seat with everyone else. It was a momentous occasion in our city’s history, and will likely become a cultural touchstone for generations to come in Spartanburg.

What Saturday’s event means for me personally was a bit simpler than all that though. For me, it means that Spartanburg is worth fighting for, that our community can be the place I’ve always hopped it could be. I’ve always had a bit of an internal conflict over my feelings about Spartanburg. Days like Saturday do a lot to resolve that conflict, moving the hometown I have that much closer to the hometown I want. It’s the sort of feeling that might take some getting used to, but it’s one that I could definitely come to love.