Notes on the Inaugural Bastille Gay Catalina Pride Cruise 2021 🏳️‍🌈 1. I love boat. 2. Margi and Amy — if you ever see this, I love you and do not deserve you. 3. On a more serious note — Pride this year felt demoralizing due to the performative and increasingly transparent corporate commandeering of a month supposedly dedicated to the celebration and history of all LGBTQIA+ people. Even on the queer side of things, I found myself questioning the exclusionary “homonormativity” of gay-run events. The beauty of gayness and queerness to me is found in embracing campness, celebrating what makes each of us unique and different from the norm. In Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay Notes on “Camp” she offers numerous, sometimes contradictory aphorisms, such as “camp sees everything in quotation marks” and “it is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off’, of things being what they are not.” Although I find these descriptions rather apt, it was not until a gay chef by the name of Lou Rand Hogan published The Gay Cookbook in 1965, that “camp” was presented as a way of being in the world, a statement more intrinsic to the idea of identity than Sontag’s perspective of camp being a way of seeing the world. This assertion lay in sharp contrast with early gay rights activists’ emphasis on “respectable” self-presentation—assimilating to heteronormativity to the point of invisibility—something I think all queer people have to fight throughout their lives. But, it is in queer spaces that we are able to forge families without cultural blueprints and experience the pursuit of relationships for the sake of intimacy alone, whether romantic, platonic or somewhere in between. This trip so kindly organized by @nickpritzker could not have been more queer, more camp; it was a special type of queer space where everyone’s individuality was celebrated, boundaries respected, and judgement left on the shore. I felt birthed into a family grounded in kindness and love for each other’s queerness and personal expressions of identity. I felt a real sense of community, even if only fleeting. 4. I have so much love for everyone on board. See you at family dinner!