Happy Pride!
This weekend has been different from any other year so far, both expectedly and unexpectedly so. It's different even than it was last year, in that last year
everything was virtual, stay-home orders were still very much in effect, and any part of Pride that I experienced was exclusively online. This year we still have some restrictions, but far less than last year: no huge public gatherings allowed just yet, which means still no public Pride Parade today, The ironic cumulative effect is that, with many people out and about but with fewer Pride related events to attend, Pride seems to have even less of a direct presence, for me at least, than it did last year. Even though I spent a lot of time outside and around other people!
The organizers of Capitol Hill Pride, as it happens, this year decided to put on an in-person event after all. This was still very, very different from normal, three key reasons.
The first, probably least significant reason, was that they did not have the permits to shut down several blocks of Broadway like usual, and instead put on their event at Cal Anderson Park—usually the location of Trans Pride on Friday. (Trans Pride hasn't happened: even though they also put on virtual events last year, this year they have
indefinitely postponed it, I think falling in line with a lot of organizations who just hope to be able to hold delayed, in-person Pride events later this year.)
The other two reasons, in my assumption, are fairly equal in their likelihood of contributing to how different Capitol Hill Pride was this year. The simplest of those two is just the weather: Alexia and I went to the Seattle Asian Art Museum at Volunteer Park yesterday so we could finally see the building reopened with its very cool remodel additions, and afterward we walked down to the Pike/Pine corridor for lunch, after which I asked if we could go take a quick look at Capitol Hill Pride happening at Cal Anderson Park. And I mentioned this to her then: the temperature was approaching a record 100° by then—the official high at SeaTac was 102°—this in the middle of a historic three-day extreme heat wave (forecast today is 100°; tomorrow a stunning 108°), and surely a lot of people just stayed home if they had air conditioning there, or went somewhere else with air conditioning. That was precisely why I suggested Alexia and I go out for lunch, after all: and we walked into no fewer than three other places that were still too warm before settling on the less crowded but comfortably cool Ayutthaya Thai Restaurant on Pike Street. I would bet anything, if the weather were at least 15° or more cooler, more people would have come to the festival.
I got a picture of their empty mainstage, and wondered whether anyone ever performed on it at all. The event officially started at noon, and my photo there was not taken until 3:11, which I would have assumed would be a peak time for entertainment to be happening? Their schedule touts events from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., after all, and here it was just short of a ghost town, vendor booths lined along just a few different sections of the perimeter of Bobby Morris Playfield at Cal Anderson Park.
But, I haven't gotten to the third reason yet, and it's the most complicated—so much so that I opted not to even bring it up to Alexia, as I wasn't even sure where she would land with her opinions on it. This is because Alexia, nice as she is, is a white woman who has a tendency to think in terms of "equality" without spending a lot of time on the nuances of "equity."
The organizers of Capitol Hill Pride got themselves embroiled in controversy, which gained national attention—there was even
a Newsweek article about it (and in plenty of other national publications). It all stems from a Black Pride event, called "Tale B(l)ack Pride," including in the fee structure for their event a "reparations fee" for "white people and their accomplices," in an effort to keep the event free for Black and Brown queer people.
To say that this was triggering to white people would be an understatement. I keep wondering who even found out about this and decided to bring it to the attention to oversensitive dipshits who decided to blow it all out of proportion, but I am quite sure none of this would have gotten the national attention it got if not for the organizers of Capitol Hill Pride (
not Seattle Pride, this must be noted; this is a distinctly separate organization, actually with its own history of being problematic for multiple reasons)
sending a complaint about it to the Seattle Human Rights Commission, literally complaining of "reverse racism," which doesn't exist.
The Capitol Hill Blog ran
a nicely detailed piece about all of this, even sharing the Seattle Human Rights Commission's full letter in response, which was on point:
The unique nature of your situation does not in fact violate any of your human rights as stated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights ... which is the charter by which our Commission operates. I mean, duh. How the fuck does the fee structure of a Black queer event that has nothing to do with Capitol Hill Pride even remotely have anything to do withtheir human rights? It only would if they were somehow denying white queer people access to any queer space at all. And guess what? White queer people have lots of options, where, incidentally, they feel far safer than many people of color do.
White people in general is one thing. I'm really starting to get sick of a lot of white
queer people, who somehow think that because they are part of an oppressed group, they are on an equal playing field with people of color, or especially queer people of color. Which is preposterous.
I did take to twitter to convey my disappointment in this:
The Capitol Hill Blog's publisher retweeted both the first and third tweet in that thread, which resulted in the first one getting retweeted three more times—chump change in terms of social media exposure overall, but far greater than usual exposure for me; that first tweet now has approaching 3000 impressions, and 165 engagements. It has all of two @ replies, though, predictably siding with Capitol Hill Pride.
Seattle Pride organizers themselves, along with a heartening amount of other organizations, have not only
stood in support of Taking B(l)ack Pride, but many others called for a boycott of Capitol Hill Pride, with several performers and speakers pulling out of their booked engagements. That may be the biggest contributor to how pathetic the "festival" looked yesterday.
I don't know why I keep looking at comments on web pages about this, though. It is always predictably disappointing, and it's particularly disheartening to see the number of white queer people shouting about so-called "reverse racism." And just consider
this Facebook post by the Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network:
We’ve been receiving threats of violence from cis het and cis gay white men, if you still have questions about why we don’t feel safe at Pride and created our own, this is why..
And anyone who might read that and be tempted to go down the road of victim blaming: I would caution against it. Even I found myself thinking at first about how counterproductive it appears for the organizers of the event to list a "reparations fee" (which is actually a sliding scale suggested donation, something most media outlets willfully either downplay or outright ignore), but then I stopped myself: this event is not for me. It's none of my fucking business! As I already stated, I have plenty of options for Pride events already. Why is it so important that I get "access" to this one for people of color? It isn't! And I have plenty more "access" than the media would have you believe anyway.
I did find a web page listing places to give support for the event and the TWOCSN, and I sent them $20 via Venmo. Clearly they need all the support they can get. (I also paid $18 for my Virtual Pride ticket—again, not affiliated with Capitol Hill Pride—which was also on a sliding scale, I could have "paid" $0, but I wanted to support them and help them succeed and keep going with better events in the future.) I actually even thought about going to the event just to pay one of those "reparation fees" and then just walking away, but decided that was a bit of a fantasy of grandstanding, so I just sent a quiet donation. Is it grandstanding for me to tell you about it here? To a far lesser degree, I would argue; I doubt any of those people are reading my blog.
Well, anyway. I usually enjoy the Capitol Hill Pride Festival, but its organizers have always kind of sucked. The event started literally because people on Capitol Hill were pissed about Seattle Pride moving the parade downtown in 2006, a perfectly reasonable move after the event outgrew the space on Broadway. But, Capitol Hill Pride always had an undercurrent of resentment to its very existence, which means that, to a degree at least, it was founded on pettiness. I will freely admit it's not all very simple, and that Pride moving downtown resulted in a lot of loss of revenue for Capitol Hill businesses, but many Capitol Hill businesses, particularly gay clubs, have been putting on their own events all along. (I know that certain clubs started doing on-the-hill events instead of continuing to participate in the Parade.) But, growing pains are a part of life, Seattle Pride kept growing, and it needed more space.
The
Capitol Hill Pride website—which, by the way, has always been janky as shit, just this side of a too-busy amateur website from 1997—also has this as part of a statement near the top of their landing page:
We stand proud in the fact we will never charge admission or ask for donations based on anyone's skin color. Oh, fuck off! Passive-aggressive, much?"
Anyway. That's the state of the Capitol Hill Pride Festival in 2021. It's a sad story, and an unfortunate case of way too many (mostly white) people accusing people of color of being "divisive" while having no idea how racist they're actually being.
As a result, I've got all of about 12 photos of this year's Capitol Hill Pride Festival Flickr album, by some distance
Just a couple quick other sides: above is one exterior shot of one of the expanded and remodeled portions of the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park; I have a full album of 29 shots just from visiting there, which can be seen
here. It was really nice getting some time inside there with its air conditioning, and then as I said we walked down to Pike Street to eat lunch and get some more air conditioning.
We also went out for dinner! Turns out Shobhit has
another cousin in the area, attending UW and living in student housing, but younger and from a different side of Shobhit's family from Abhishek. Both are technically first cousins once removed, but whereas Abhishek is Shobhit's maternal cousin's son, this guy is Shobhit's
paternal cousin's son.
His name is Harshal, which, when Shobhit pronounces it sounds a whole lot like "Hirschel." This is just a difference in naming conventions and the Hindi alphabet and how they pronounce letters—much like the a in Shobhit's friend Sachin being pronouned "uh," like "Suchin." Both incidences of the letter a are actually being pronounced the same way, but with an r after the first one it winds up sounding more like "her"—"her-shell." Harshal. Anyway, he's 31 years old and just graduated with an MBA, I think he said.
I guess Shobhit met up with him just once last year, giving him some career advice which Harshal last night told him was very good advice, but that was actually the first time they had ever met in person. It turns out Harshal has
another cousin—on his mother's side, so not related to Shobhit—who lives in an apartment all of one block from here, and which Harshal visits frequently. He had stayed overnight there on Friday night, and Shobhit invited him over for dinner last night at 6:30.
He came bearing gifts: a Trader Joe's tote bag full of
three packets of cinnamon buns, half moon cookies, and lemon cakes. Sheesh, way too much! Oh well. It was a sweet gesture, and the guy seemed very nice, if a little bit shy. He actually talked about how he used to be way more shy and is a lot less so now. I was dreading the thought of making our non-air-conditioned condo even hotter by cooking anything, and eventually we all decided to go out to eat. After some deliberation, we finally settled on this new place, also a block away, called Bombay Burger, which used to be a pho' place. Harshal had been there and said it was very good, and I had wanted to try it ever since I saw it was open. It was indeed very tasty, and I found myself worried about how few customers they seemed to have. They did have a few takeout orders picked up while we were there, but for maybe 80% of our time there we were the only ones dining in; when we left there was one other table occupied by another South Asian couple. I love their concept and want them to last and I will be back.
They were also air conditioned, which was nice. But, Shobhit wanted to go back home and lounge on the couch so we returned, and by 8:30 Harshal headed back to his other cousin's place. Shobhit offered him a ride home but Harshal said he had some stuff to pick up at the other place and would take an Uber back.
So, I had a pretty packed Saturday. Sunday may or may not be similar, although I kind of hope it will be.
[posted 9:37 am]
