i’ll never love you back, tesco

reflections on the month of june

Somebody asked me if I was going to Pride today, and I just made a weird sort of noise. The person thought they’d offended me, and I reassured them that they hadn’t, but felt at a loss to explain myself, and my noise. I’m not going to go to Pride, because I don’t want to. But I couldn’t muster the energy to launch into a diatribe about it having become a corporate marketing exercise aimed mostly at straight people. Everyone who wants to hear that take has heard it, and if you haven’t yet, what’s the point? Nobody wants to sound like the guy bitching that his favourite band sold out way before you even heard of them. I eventually managed to say something about it being too noisy, which isn’t wrong. I don’t like noise. But there are things I’d put up with it for.

In truth, a weird noise somewhat sums up my feelings about the whole thing. I’m not interested in telling anyone they shouldn’t go and have a sparkly party. We need sparkly parties, as much as we need fiery protests. But I personally wouldn’t tend to go to big parties with a lot of noise and amplified music and lots of people I don’t know, and I resent feeling like I have to go to this one because it’s gay-flavoured. You can go, if you want: it’s very much my politics to let people enjoy things. But that also means I get to enjoy staying at home.

Image of sheet music with the play instruction “suddenly very gay” above the stave - from r/BandMemes, usually found doing the rounds with the caption “corporations during Pride”

This feeling of stubbornness also applies to how I feel about corporations turning their logos rainbow. It’s obviously quite funny, but there’s also something about it that stirs resentment in me. It’s not just the cynicism and vapidity of it - that goes without saying - but something in me twitches at the way these corporations will not stop at rainbow colours, and insist upon trying to tell me how to feel. For example: my local Tesco tells me it wants to create a safe space for me. My local John Lewis exhorts me to be proud of myself. These were never expectations I had of John Lewis or Tesco, and frankly, they presume an intimacy between us which I don’t reciprocate. Tesco doesn’t presume to know me or anything about my feelings of safety in the context of any of my other identities, or Equality-Act-2010-protected characteristics. Why, in the month of June, does it feel entitled to lay claim to my heart?

I feel obliged to acknowledge all the progress that there’s been, that’s led us to the point where Tesco can exhort me to feel safe. I’m not sure who obliges me to acknowledge this, but I feel it nonetheless. Perhaps that’s another thing I don’t like being compelled to feel: gratitude. For the fact that, twenty years ago, I was homophobically bullied, and now my local bus company (“STAGECOACH: PROUD TO SERVE LGBTQIA+”) says it theoretically disapproves. Well, all right. I’m grateful, in a way, but I think we all deserve a little better.

The philosopher Sara Ahmed, in her book On Being Included, talks about what it means when an institution says a certain group is “welcome”:

To be made welcome by an explicit act of address works to reveal what is implicit: that those who are already given a place are the ones who are welcoming rather than welcomed, the ones who are in the structural position of hosts.

- On Being Included, p.42, emphasis original

To be told that you are welcome means that you do not have the right to decide who is welcome. You are, instead, a beneficiary of that decision. And for that, you should be grateful, because it is given at the host’s grace.

This is why I want more than corporate Pride, then. I don’t want to be a welcomee. I don’t even want to take over the position of welcomer, with the asymmetry of power that implies. I want horizontal, mutual, ongoing welcomings. I want more than validity bestowed upon me by profit-making entities. When someone tells me to be proud of myself, I want it to mean something.