Quote Originally Posted by Paul G. View Post
You wouldn’t say "I'm proud to be 5'11". I’m proud to have a predisposition for colon cancer." So why the fuck would you be proud to be Irish, or proud to be Italian, or American or anything?"
Being a gay is just "a fucking genetic accident", no more. You are proud of that? Congratulations!
I can't find the photo now, but a few months ago I saw a picture of a Russian gay activist carrying a sign with the following slogan:

Я не горжусь тем, что я гей -- я горжусь тем, что не стыжусь.

(I'm quoting from memory; the wording may have been slightly different, but it was close to this.)

Anyway, my point is that "Gay Pride" (or "Irish Pride", or "Black Pride", or "Jewish Pride") originated as defensive reactions against other people's prejudice:




So, "Gay Pride" makes sense to the extent that an individual is surrounded by people who say "You ought to be ashamed!" But I would certainly agree that, as Other People's Prejudice diminishes, the "need" for events expressing "I'm Proud to be [fill-in-the-blank]" becomes less obvious. So minorities may lose interest in having special parades -- or, in some cases, these parades cease being political demonstrations and become Mardi-Gras-style events.

P.S. By the way -- it should be noted that, contrary to popular belief, "No Irish Need Apply" signs were probably quite rare in US history, and were mainly found in neighborhoods where Irish-American Catholics lived next door to British-American Protestants. Which is to say that Swedish-American Protestants and Italian-American Catholics had no particular prejudice against their Irish neighbors; anti-Irish hostility, where it existed, was mostly an obsession of certain US Protestants who had (recently) immigrated from the British Isles. (And the prejudice went in the other direction, too -- a lot of Irish-American Catholics hated British-American Protestants, but weren't hostile towards German-American Protestants.)