Brian Kochera: There was a time when Pride Events were new and exciting. The time has gone (at least in my geographical area) where there was a sense of risk and strength just in showing up someplace openly gay en mass. Sad to say but I think the few advances we've had has created a sense of complacency and worse blase-ness.
Actually, they still are new and exciting for those who have recently come out (to themselves or others). What's exciting for newbies tends to be boring for oldbies. While it's certainly true that the focus of Pride events has generally shifted from protest to celebration, I think you and others may also be experiencing the same perceptual fallacy as the adult who looks at a kid's math homework problems and finds them "dumbed-down" compared to the math homework problems he did when he was the kid's age; the problem is that when he was a kid, he was looking at the problems from the perspective of someone who hadn't yet learned the subject, but as an adult, he's looking at something that he's already learned, which makes them seem a lot less challenging.
In fact, IMHO Pride events are becoming less and less useful as a
tool for political change simply because we've already
solved the easiest of our political problems and the ones we now
need to solve are too difficult to solve by just marching in the
streets. Protest marches can make a dent in problems like police
raids on gay bars or even the existence of sodomy laws (essentially
simple issues that can be easily translated to sound bites); they
can't do an awful lot for more complex issues like getting ENDA
passed, where what's needed isn't so much public
consciousness-raising as rather tedious lobbying.
