Flashback: “Pride” vs Privacy

On the importance of an unrevealed inner life

Is there something about our culture that is anti-privacy, anti-intimacy, and opposed to the idea of an inner life that belongs to you alone? What is it?

The question occurred to me over the last month as I watched the summer Pride celebrations. Over time the concept of the festival has expanded and one can no longer say that it’s simply a recognition of the validity of marginal lives by marginalised people. The expansion of who celebrates Pride, and what it covers, threw up some startling moments.

The most obvious one was this Washington Post editorial about exposing children to Kink during pride. This got lots of attention and mockery - mainly because of the idea that we should seek to expose children to adult horniness.

There’s another angle to the story that didn’t get quite as much play. It’s a continuation of a trend - that over time it is increasingly expected to make private sexual impulses public so that they can be celebrated, and so that where they are marginal we can get kudos for them; and the tension that creates with with sexuality as a source of intimacy, because it makes our desires a matter of public interest and allows them to be commodified.

The obvious retort is that you can celebrate whatever you like and choose to keep whatever you like about your life private; in this case some people have simply chosen disclosure. I don’t actually think that’s entirely true though, and I think it’s less true every day. There *is* a part of our culture that regards privacy as not just dispensable, but as a bad thing, and wants to push us down a path that erodes it. Pride often seems to epitomise that. How did we get here?