'Free beer for breeders'

'Straight pride' events are a study in the defensiveness of cis-heterosexuality—and its fundamental instability.

Heterosexuality is beer, I guess. Photo: kazuend

Today, I clicked on a news article about a “straight pride” festival in Boise, Idaho. I shouldn’t have clicked, but I did.

The event has an incredibly dorky name involving the word “hetero” and “awesome,” but I won’t say it outright to avoid giving it an SEO boost. The guy who started it—white, Christian, ex-cop, father of six, the owner of a local “saloon,” and very vocally heterosexual—has scheduled the festival for June to coincide with LGBTQ+ pride. The event’s tagline: “Defending, honoring, and fortifying traditional family values.”

These straight pride events have popped up in the past—and it’s important to note that turnout has been low. It’s obvious that on one level it’s a troll, right? These events are designed to outrage and sicken. But it would be too flip to just write these events off as trolling. They are often that in addition to expressing very real beliefs about straight relationships.

I find myself fascinated by these representations of heterosexuality that claim to be celebratory and prideful, and yet are filled with hate, insecurity, and cynicism about relationships between men and women. And, as marginal as these events may be, I think they perfectly reflect the sensibility of mainstream right-wing political figures and MAGA fans.

To my point on hate: straight pride events are rabidly anti-queer and anti-trans. The Idaho event claims to support “sane LGB allies,” while railing against “LGBTQ+ extremism,” “anti-family nonsense,” “trans fantasies,” “trans delusions,” “predators,” “sleaze," and “cesspools of violence.” The event organizer told NBC News that LGBTQ+ pride exists so that queer people can “march down the street doing disgusting and criminal activities.”

In the past, straight pride events have also been defined by racist alt-right figures. One of the organizers of a 2019 straight pride event in Boston had ties to white supremacist groups. Straight pride is often just pride about the institution of the nuclear family—specifically, the white, cis, heterosexual, monogamous, and proliferating nuclear family.

They are absolutely obsessed with procreation.

The dude behind the Idaho event is offering free “beer for breeders” at his bar throughout the month of June. I also regret to inform you that there’s a… straight pride rap anthem with the lyrics, “When you know you can procreate with a woman, and raise beautiful children… look at the people, thinking you evil, just because you want to see the human race have a sequel.”

When it comes to sex, there’s talk about “God’s design for one man” and “one woman” to build “kin with purpose,” as the website for the Idaho event puts it. Sex is not supposed to be “a playground for chaos,” it reads. Also: porn is a “wrecking ball” that “torches marriages.” It also “murders the soul.”

In all of this, you might note a total lack of joy and pleasure. It’s all duty and defense.

Asa Seresin’s 2019 viral essay on heteropessimism noted that a lot of straight people reacted to news of the Boston event by poking fun at the black-and-white stripes of the “straight pride” flag, which resembles the stripes of a prison uniform.

‘Heterosexuality is a prison!’ a chorus declared, vocalizing one of heteropessimism’s central maxims. … Confronted by Straight Pride, many are keen to emphasize that they are not that kind of heterosexual, that they are, in fact, ashamed of being straight, and that, not to be dramatic, they see heterosexuality as a prison within which they are confined against their will.

The thing is, the straight pride people actually crave that confinement. Instead of the “playground of chaos,” they want to be locked inside the prison of cis, married, monogamous, reproductive heterosexuality. They don’t feel safe outside of it; and they don’t feel safe if anyone else is outside of it.

You might even say that they’re hetero-optimists, just so long as everything from public policy to pop culture helps to strong-arm us into it. Just how awesome is heterosexuality if it requires such dogged protection against seemingly constant existential threats, especially given that those threats include… videos of other straight people having sex?

Of course, this isn’t just a question for the straight-pride bigots and weirdos. We all live inside societal pressures designed to enforce straightness—and cisness—or what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality.”

So much mainstream political rhetoric could be framed as expressions of straight pride. Consider JD Vance at CPAC telling young men not to suppress their “masculine urges,” and to refuse to be shamed for liking “to tell a joke” and “have a beer with your friends.” (Heterosexuality is beer, according to the prideful straights. It’s a Bud Light commercial.) How about Donald Trump Jr.’s transphobic celebration of the recent Miss Universe winner being a “biological & objectively attractive” woman?

I wrote a few months back about the “recent phenomenon of straight conservative men proudly reclaiming their desire, as if it had been taken from them.” Just one piece of that was MAGA dudes proudly seizing onto Sydney Sweeney’s body as an anti-woke “gotcha.”

Even looking beyond the explicitly right-wing, there is Mark Zuckerberg waxing about “masculine” and “feminine” energy, which boils down to a romantic and essentializing endorsement of cis-heterosexuality.

I dunno, it’s all so depressing. And yet, in a weird way, the defensiveness of straight pride underscores a fundamental instability—much like with the insistent social pressures of comphet and the machinations of patriarchy more generally. An alternative possibility is being defended against, which suggests that things can, in fact, be otherwise—like, say, joyful and pleasurable, relaxed and non-compulsory.