Featured photo from the Athens, GA tourism page
Pride month is over, so it’s a perfect opportunity for corny people like me to misquote Proverbs and say that it’s time for the Fall. Especially when it lets me listen again to one of my favorite REM songs, which always conjures up good memories of my college years in Athens.
Corny jokes aside, it’s also a good opportunity for a refresher on what Pride month is all about, which is the rejection of shame. There have always been bad faith attempts to equate it with the deadly sins, from people trying to disguise their bigotry as a valiant fight against sinfulness.
Back when I first came out, I even bought into a less-bigoted version of that, wondering “what is there to be proud of? It’s just a part of me, and being ‘proud’ would be like being ‘proud’ of having brown hair or being right-handed.” The part that I was missing — and I wonder if people still miss, or if it’s nothing more than disingenuous posturing to keep marginalizing people — is that the achievement to be proud of isn’t simply being gay, or trans, or bisexual, or non-binary, or any of the variations on “queer,” but in having the courage to live your life being true to yourself.
Keeping with the “not what I thought it was at first,” I’m pairing it with The Beatles’ “If I Fell”. I always thought that this song was romantic at best, harmless at worst, but paying more attention to the lyrics, I see that it’s kind of gross. Maybe not “I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her away from the things that she loved” gross, but still the opposite of everything I think of as romantic.
Based on the title and wistfulness, I’d always thought of it as being about falling recklessly in love, but of course it’s explicitly not. It’s a guy on the rebound demanding loyalty from a new prospect before they’ve even gotten to know each other, and presumably before she finds out what made his last girlfriend break up with him. Even if he weren’t setting up a relationship where he’s constantly comparing the new girl to his last girlfriend, he explicitly says at the end that he’s trying to make her jealous.
And appropriately, he includes the line “don’t hurt my pride like her,” in the bad sense of “pride.” Which all leaves me asking the question I’ll probably be asking a lot over the next eleven months: are the straights okay?