PRIDE COMES BEFORE A FALL, I FEAR...

Setting out to alienate his last few friends in the world, the Troll weighs in on the thorny issue of Gay Pride.

I believe I have remarked elsewhere that as long as Gay Pride is nothing but Gay Shame with the sign inverted, we have made no progress. And until we are willing to speak in the same breath of Gay Lust, Gay Sloth, Gay Envy, Gay Avarice, Gay Wrath, and Gay Gluttony, we still have a ways to go.

Because the question is not whether we are proud [and the antics of many Gay Pride parades can really make you wonder: proud of WHAT exactly?] but whether we live in such a way that our neighbors are proud to know us.

We [if the rest of you will even allow me the pronoun any more] stand before a monumental decision, almost forty years after Stonewall, and entering so clearly into a second generation of liberation: are we going to insist on being outlaws and defining ourselves as such, or are we going to insist that we are just like everybody else with a couple of negligible differences? At the moment, the political landscape produces some serious dissonance, cognitive and otherwise.

On the one hand, there is the claim that there is no difference between us and those who gave us life. This is a claim whose possibility we owe entirely to Margaret Sanger, because before sterility became a prefered choice within marriage, it was perfectly clear that marriage entailed things that our unions cannot. But this claim is coupled with a curious, categorical decision NOT to pursue civil unions although a majority of Americans, including President Bush, is in favor of according gay couples civil rights by granting them, but to push for what Andrew Sullivan calls "the M word", which will involve us all in a fight to the death with an enemy we cannot hope to defeat because, limited as his numbers are, he has the vast majority of Americans on his side when it comes to what marriage is and means.

On the other, you have the insistence that mainstream American society is the oppressive force and that we are the liberated few that have to show them the way to their own liberation. David Nimmons, in his seemingly endless book The Soul Beneath The Skin goes to enormous lengths to document the differences between gay and straight men, to the enormous credit of the former, needless to say. But do we really want three-quarters of ALL marriages that survive five years to be open as our relationships are? Imagine for a moment that was the world you grew up in...

And the statistics he trots out with such assurance that we are creating new forms of male society seem to show nothing more than how in these aspects at least, gay men are more like women. However, sexual behavior is not one of them. There, it is quite clear that relationships between two men are free from a lot of whatever it is that women bring to an enduring relationship. To our credit? I ask you. Until we are willing to look at ALL the facts and not pick and choose to bolster our own arguments, we will be stuck in a dream world of our own making.

Yes, no one should sit still when someone else tries to use the name of God to declare him an outcast and a leper, but it would behoove us to remember that Christ healed the lepers and told the adulteress to "go and sin no more". If God is not a liberating force, he is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus. But if liberation does not root in God, we have to ask ourselves what force it roots in.

Don't get me wrong [well, OK, so it's too late for that]. I want everyone to know that he is much a child of God as the next person on the planet, and I believe with every bone in my body that anyone who attempts to declare the opposite in the name of God is clearly speaking for Someone Else Indeed. Why won't people just read the gospels, for Christ's sake? It would be nice if they took them even a little bit seriously.

But all of us have fallen short of the glory of God. And that means that we have, as much as the ones we blame for our former condition. So here's what I'd like to see: Gay Humility, the sign of a community that admits its shortcomings and its temptations, that can stop insisting on its rights and spend some time reflecting on its responsibilities. Gay Meekness, so we can inherit the earth.

Gay Charity, not focused solely on its own circle, but admitting its place in the larger scheme of things. Gay Hope, for a world where we seek to come together rather than to Balkanize our society further. And Gay Faith, in the unforeseeable acts of a God who burns without consuming us, who brings water out of rocks in the desert, raises up our dead bones and clothes them in sinew, and promises the immanent descent of a city radiant with gemstones, with a garden blooming at its center. All for us.

Well, I can live in hope, can't I?