Gay pride, white privilege

What this episode covers

I start the podcast by sharing the experience I had last weekend visiting the gay pride festival in Palm Springs, California. Palm Springs is a small city of about 45,000 people, just west of Los Angeles. Aside from its fame as a showcase for Mid-century Modern architecture, which overlays a cool calm on the blazing desert, it is known for its concentration of gays, estimated at 35-40% of the population. So gay pride is a big deal. This year they cordoned off ten blocks of the main downtown for shows, displays, and of course a big parade on Sunday morning. Twenty thousand visitors poured in to partake in three days of festivities. And it was all…so civilized. There wasn’t a bare butt or breast in sight. Three or four guys in speedos were handing out fliers, but they seemed a bit self-conscious in the presence of all the children and their gay and straight parents. The whole extended family was there, grandma and grandpa too. The displays and parade floats were sponsored not only by gay organizations but by Well Fargo, Whole Foods and the local car dealers. Nobody was tossing condoms into the crowd. The parade featured the local high school bands and drill teams. As a veteran of the gay pride happenings of the 70‘s and 80‘s, in the darker times of anti-gay legislation and the plague of AIDS, I must say I felt a certain loss. The spirit of being part of a tribe with a real fight on its hands has been subsumed by the reality of our victory and integration into the wider world. Back in the day, when my partner and I joined the Gay March on Washington we walked the streets proudly hand in hand — for the first time in public, tears streaming down our faces — with 500,000 other people who were bonded by the experience of having been shut out, frightened and often abused because of who they loved. The sense of stepping out of the shadows in all our glory was to experience a group identify and aliveness that I have not experienced since. The gay rights movement of the late 20th century has substantially won its two big fights: 1) AIDS, which while not cured is manageable, and 2) social acceptance, with gay marriage now legal in 32 states and a comprehensive Supreme Court ruling expected next summer. So last weekend was a bit of a lesson for me in the power of tribal identity and the pain of its loss. I have a better understanding of why people in today’s tribal cultures are not willing to give up their identity easily. Those of us who have do so are left with the sense that we have lost something precious. But I don’t wish to have it back any more than I wish to go back to childhood. There are bigger, higher battles to be fought, with comrades that are bound together more by creativity than necessity. At integral consciousness we begin to be able to create new tribal connections, but this time they are more more memetic than genetic, more organized around ideas than blood relations. We’re able to experience the juice of being deeply bonded to all kinds of people in ways that are not exclusive but expansive. HEALING RACISM BY POINTING OUT PRIVILEGE One of the key projects of the green altitude of development is to find and bring home those people who have been shut out of previous stages of development: the weak, the sinners, those who don’t have the opportunity to succeed. I often marvel that after millennia of cutthroat conflict and competition humanity’s next move is to become sensitive to the vulnerable and, like a fretful mother, we’re unable to rest until all of the family is at the table. In the last sixty years as the cutting edge of culture has moved into mature orange and green altitudes, we have seen in the developed world the arising of large social movements such as feminism, civil rights and gay rights. These have met with huge success, particularly in the legal area where protection against racial and sexual discrimination has been won and is in the proc...

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