Wednesday Morning Rant

It's "Pride Month," though it is easy to miss it this year - at least, it's easy to miss it in some places. Some years ago, I fled the conquered territory I used to call home and moved elsewhere. Where I live now, you would be hard-pressed to find evidence that it's time for the annual celebration of child grooming and other perversions. In other places, though, it's very much business as usual on that front.

Being in the midst of an apparent preference cascade is a weird situation, and where you are plays a role in how it looks. Things are in fact changing. Many outfits who do business outside the blue enclaves or have to make terms with the United States government under its current executive are fairly suddenly pretending that they never remade their logos as rainbows and agitated for revolution. If you live in the widening sea of normality, it's increasingly easy to forget that any of this is even a thing at all this year.

But all it takes to experience a touch of culture shock is to travel a few hundred miles to an island of Party power. I recently took a trip to a big eastern city for work and it was like entering another world. It wasn't entirely bad, but I found it a bit weird. Starting with the good, the hellhole factor was pretty low. Work usually takes me to the west coast, so my default assumption was that I was traveling to a no-go zone. It wasn't. I was in a fancy part of town, but being in a rich area doesn't really matter in a place like San Francisco. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there are still places where at least the moneyed parts of a city still feel normal rather than like a totally dystopian hellscape. Expectations status: subverted.

But it was also like stepping back in time several years. It was very obviously "Pride Month" there. Local restaurants loudly advertising rainbow-colored food with rainbow napkins in the dispensers. Banners and signs up on buildings and in the windows of businesses. Billboards and ads on buses bedecked in rainbows with vague statements about "diversity" or spoiling for a fight with The Man. Even big companies that have gone more or less mum online or in wider campaigns had the flag flying in the enclave. The mega-corp I was visiting had "All Genders Bathrooms" scattered throughout their swanky, brand new digs. It's nowhere to be found in their public marketing, but still very much a thing on the inside.

It all felt kind of dated and worn-out. It's how things used to be, and not in a good way. Coming from a place where this stuff basically doesn't exist anymore, it was like I wandered into a time warp. "Pride month" and its trappings are still very much real things in some places, though others have emphatically moved on. It's still big in some of the enclaves, but many other places enthusiastically sloughed it off, consigning its corpse to the ashcan where it belongs. The transition was jarring and underscored that nothing happens at all once.

How are things where you live? Is "Pride Month" still on full display, or is it already in dustbin?

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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