Does anyone else find Pride Month depressing?

Kind of like when people don’t have family at Christmas. Thank God that I never had to choose a family.

I've always found Pride to be depressing. I came out to my family during Pride, when I was only 18, and was disowned by my family. I came out on the advice of my much older gay friends, who insisted it was important to my self-worth. In the meantime, these older gay friends all had families in other cities who still didn't know they were gay. I very much felt that I was a naive scapegoat. I've never gotten past that feeling, whenever Pride comes up. I try to support the younger generations, though.

I never felt that way until the stores and corporations started making such a big deal out of it, OP. Somehow, the bigger the deal that is made, the more hollow and plastic it feels. It feels like it’s all being done out of obligations, not from any real sense of alliance.

Contrast it to the early footage of Pride parades which feel more authentic.

I don’t really like Pride anymore for many reasons but one is that it’s just too hot and crowded.

And since I don’t really enjoy it anymore, I just no longer go. People still like it so they can have it. I’m not going to bitch and ruin it for them.

It used to be a march and a weekend of partying gays, many in town for the weekend. It wasn't the be-all end-all because the clubs were always booming and people didn't live online all day.

Now people seem to focus on it desperately. And the crowds are half-comprised of relatives, supporters and 'queer' str8 women.

R2 Your folks never came back around ?

R6, They did, and we became very close. I've posted about our relationship here on other threads. But I was left alone (back in 1980, I think) to face all that loneliness by hypocrites who looked down on a working-class guy like me trying to make a decent living in Ohio, while graduate students from New York marched in parades, but kept secrets from their own families. I just Googled one of those guys for shits and giggles, and he has his own website as a PhD of Hebraic Studies. He hung me out to dry back when I was nearly starving after being cut off by my family. So much for a 'gay family'.

Then don’t join in, OP. Pretty simple, really.

I find all the Dykes on Bikes incredibly offensive.

in the context of project 2025, pride month ain’t depressing.

this year seems especially relevant and crucial.

fuck them and their "YMCA."

abe lincoln slept with ahis lover josh speed and sent josh love letters. .

and ben franklin’s drag-name was silence dogood.

I find gay shame and gay suicide much more depressing.

R10 except for the inconvenient little fact that everything that comes after LGB is kind of how we ended up in this mess. Showcasing that really doesn’t help us. You know what would help us? Showcasing clean looking professional gay men.

Well, first of all, it's ridiculous it's now Pride MONTH.

An entire month.

It was fine being one DAY. Or, even a weekend. Which is what it was, for years, then it drastically started changing about 15 years ago. Businesses wisened up and realized "oh...we can make some bank on this". So, EVERYONE started doing events and you can't have them all over a 2 day weekend so Friday got added, then Thursday, and then it was Pride WEEK.

Then, every neighborhood and suburb had to have an event. Now, in certain parts of the country, every town with more than 5 gays in it, has an event. And, you need more than one week to have all these events. It's actually more than a month now in Seattle/Puget Sound/Western Washington. Late May through end of June is packed with things but there's "Gay Black Pride" and "Gay Latin Pride" stuff in July/August.

And, obviously not every event is for everyone and you're not obligated to attend any of them but it's all a bit overwhelming and exhausting. And, expensive because quite a lot of it is about spending money.

I used to go to the Sunday parade followed by the “event” in the park. That is, until the late 90s, when corporate sponsors took over, the festival in the park turned into tents with different themes blasting music and selling alcohol, squeezing out the simple pleasure of walking around holding your boyfriend’s hand, chatting with people staffing tables and booths of social clubs and organizations.

I’m not mad about the transformation of Pride, but I’m just not interested in it any more.

If we can have black history month, women history month, etc,-- why not gay month?? I do agree the corporations being involved makes things weird, but whatever.

R15 because the gays are now seen as “privileged,” and just as it now seems inappropriate to give white people a special month, it is now also seen as inappropriate to give gays their own month. Conversely, the trans are now seen as the oppressed, so it’s OK to give them as many months of their own as they want.

I'm proud every day.

I don't hate trans. Guess I'm an anachronism now

The OP and the Trump admin finding common ground every June. Depressing?

Pride seems to have turned into at least a little bit as homophobia month and gay men, not lesbians, not straights, attacking the trans . Yes this confuses straight people but as Donald always says it is what it is.

My view is similar to R14's. For me, the events are of no interest. Formerly Stonewall type events were more about visibility and politics and less 7-figure budgets, corporate sponsorship, and not a common purpose but a few hundred not complementary but competing agendas. In my view, they used to be more about visibility in the sense of a march through the city, with room for different factions of homosexuals to come together without excessive squabbling and positioning.

The marches have in many cases been reduced to parades through whatever district has a few gay and lesbian bars left to some remote park with a huge spread of corporate sponsors selling beer and everything else. They're commercial fairs with more pridefulness than purpose, or rather that purpose isn't one that I find important for me. I'm happily gay, I don't hide that fact, I don't hesitate to hold my partner's hand or show affection, or introduce into a conversation that I'm gay. I don't expect or want all gays and lesbians to follow the same set of interests or paths or rules, or to dress or behave like me, no more than I expect or want the same of straight people.

If Pride is a long weekend of bad music and people on stages screeching and bitchy instead of funny or talented, I'm happy to leave it to younger people who done it for decades, or for people from outside of cities to come see in Pride the possibilities of a happy gay and lesbian life, great. I have friends who live in countries where they cannot be in the least gay in their daily lives and Pride clearly has a much richer meaning for them than for me at this stage in my life. It's just not so much for me any more. I will often go to a Pride festival to meet friends who have called to say they are back visiting the city. It's not that I sit at home grumbling and reviewing my principles, it's just that I don't have much reason to go.

There needs to be a year when there are no festivals, parades or other events. Instead we all gather in public and or our homes and silently meditate for our collective health and that of our perceived enemies and for more love.

Where I work, they have placed table top Pride flags all over every available surface. Of course, it’s the current “everything under the sun” flag which is a mess. I mean, yes it’s quite nice to have recognition and I prefer it to the older days. I don’t even feel a need to come out to coworkers anymore. I either assume they know just by context clues (single guy in his early 50s) and if they don’t, it only needs to come up if it’s relevant to the conversation.

It’s just that the Pride flags around the workplace stuff feels rather insincere and maybe just a way to get my company on some “50 Best Workplaces” list.

A lot of us Boomer gays were sold a bill of goods back in the 70s and 80s about how things should be. If you worked hard and accumulated some wealth, had a nice house, worked on your body and looked good, wore the right clothes, and associated with the right crowd everything would be great. It was all about reliving high School and joining your clique.

Like one of the posters upstream the concept of "gay family" was questionable in my reality. At 66 I have maybe 3 friends I can count on. Thank God I did not buy into the materialism and actually have funds to retire on unlike so many of my peers. The gay retirement communities you see in Wilton Manors and Palm Springs are indicative of people continuing on in this mindset just with an older age aggregate.

Pride used to be about togetherness and community. Now it's a bunch of splinter groups vying for center stage with who can scream the loudest, wear the most outlandish outfit etc .

One thing about getting older is you recenter yourself. You understand what's really important and hopefully you come to terms and make peace with your prior experience and mortality.

Having "pride" is being comfortable in your own skin, being grounded, being grateful and living your life on your own terms outside of the social media ethnocentric expectations.

Pride was fun for me when it started but paled pretty quickly during the late 80s when you’d see people you tricked with before looking like shit one year and hearing they were dead the next. Takes the bloom right off the rose.

A former colleague deadnamed Bette was a dyke on her girlfriend Sage’s bike in the parade one year back then and making out topless on a mattress on the back of a truck another, all in the name of lesbian representation. She got over that: no more tits to show. She transed and now goes by the name George.

The a-little-better-than-you-gays soak up a lot of the GayPride oxygen.

Troll.

There is nothing about Pride that leaves sane gay people feeling like it involved pressure to publicly shout about liking to suck dick.

And if the first thing you think of about being gay is sucking dick, perhaps you will benefit from counseling.

Like some have posted above, it was once a day or maybe a weekend. Somehow that was all I needed.

Slight veering- anybody remember Boston Pride weekend 1998 where they got six inches of rain in one day? It was such a flooding disaster that shut down the trains and roads and knocked out phone lines that they had to reschedule?

It can also be depressing for people who are single and older. Like the "regular" world, things are overly geared towards the young. With Pride, it's geared to the young and to slutty drunk gays with enough money to buy all the tickets and all the booze. Which is fine; my standing around in a mob of people getting trashed days are long gone but it can feel a bit lonely to feel left behind.