Why “Side B” Doesn’t Belong at Pride
On June 27, 1969, the New York Police Department conducted a raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. The Queer patrons of the bar were regular victims of police harassment and state violence, but this night was different, they’d had enough. So, they resisted, and that resistance erupted into a series of riots known as the Stonewall Uprising, laying the groundwork for the Gay Liberation Movement, the forerunner to our contemporary LGBT+ rights movement.
There are competing stories and factions that debate who threw the first brick or if bricks were used at all. The “who threw the first brick/fist/Molotov cocktail” discourse is ultimately less important than the “what” of Stonewall. Shane O’Neil writes that “Stonewall was, at its core, about people reclaiming their narratives from a society that told them they were sick or pitiful or didn’t even exist.” This spirit of Stonewall was commemorated the following year with what would become known as the first Gay Pride parade. It’s what we celebrate every June.
The history of Pride is full of debates and disagreements about who or what belongs in and at Pride. There have been perennial debates revolving around whether the Kink community belongs at Pride or if police officers should be permitted to march in Pride parades. Exploring those debates, and why the debate themselves are a good thing will have to wait for another time, as will discussions around the corporatization of pride, accessibility, and systemic racism.
There may now be a new topic for us to contend with; a faction of LGBT+ Christians who embrace their sexuality while also embracing a traditionally conservative system of sexual ethics. This system expects all LGBT+ Christians to pursue celibacy or marriage to someone of the opposite sex. Does this message, and those preaching it, belong at Pride? Probably not.
One of these ministries application to participate in a pride festival was recently denied. Pieter Valk wrote in an op-ed about the ministry he founded, Equip, being rejected from participating in Franklin, Tennessee’s Pride Festival. Equip says, “Our mission is to help churches become places where LGBT+ Christians could belong and thrive according to a traditional sexual ethic.” This mission statement encapsulates much of the Side B movement, which differentiates itself from Side A—those Christians who do not view homosexual behavior as a sin. Side B argues that faithful Christians who are LGBT+ will best find personal and spiritual fulfillment in upholding the traditional sexual ethic and that this is a universal call on all Christians. A recent article described Side B as “a largely virtual community that sits in a rare liminal space between two sides of a culture war.” Existing primarily online has allowed the group to garner the benefits online spaces afford Queer people, namely how it permits the contesting of authority and affordance of identity formation. The friction point here seems to be when this community that has existed online and within Christian spaces seeks to move from the bubble a digital to contested analog space.
As a gay man, former evangelical Christian, and Side B ideolog, I agree that the message of Equip is shaming and could be harmful. Side B theology and ideology is, at least in part, a reincarnation of ex-gay theology. And while Side B almost universally condemns “conversion” or “reparative” therapies, they rigidly hold the line that all sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman is sinful and contrary to God’s plan for humanity. Both Side B and “ex-gay” theologies posit that through religion, one can overcome or at least contain their queer sexuality.
So, what does this have to do with Pride? Everything.
Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash
Pride is many things, and chief among them is a commemoration and celebration of the gay rights movement and Queer liberation. Valk writes that “A central principle of the gay rights movement has been that gay people deserve the right to choose for themselves how they identify, who they love, and what they believe.” By that definition, Side B would seem to be at cross purposes to Queer liberation because that right is not afforded to those under the authority of people who subscribe to Side B ideology.
If the only option before Christians is celibacy, opposite-sex marriage, or leaving their tradition that forecloses on any number of options and limits the degree to which they can exercise those rights Queer liberation seeks to offer. If we boil that June night in 1969 down, it was a group of Queer folks no longer content to follow the rules that said who they could love, who they could dance with, who could have sex with whom, how they should dress, identify, talk, etc. Judith Butler, in their book Excitable Speech, writes: “Oppressive language is not a substitute for the experience of violence. It enacts its own kind of violence” (9).
Stonewall was a rebellion against the oppressive language of 1969 and the use of state power to make good on the promise of violence situated in oppressive language. There is an oppressiveness to the language of Side B, and while it doesn’t carry an implied threat of physical violence, there is a threat of violence, nevertheless. Speech built upon the assertion that this set of behaviors is the only option for “faithful Christians” does violence to all who don’t believe the same way.
