Pride and a New Prejudice

We could do with some good news here in Melbourne, where a kind of grey despondency still cloaks the city, rather like East Berlin circa 1960. Though supposedly loosed of our lockdown chains, the vacant shops and empty offices we see indicate that economic recovery remains a long way off. Of course, it’s not all gloom: Premier Daniel Andrews’s sterling record in keeping coronavirus deaths in Victoria down to only 820 out of the national total of 909—that’s 90.21 per cent—shows what good hands we’re in as we wrench ourselves out of the quagmire of restrictions and embark on the painful climb back to “normality”, if anyone can remember what that is.

The good news is that through all the disruption and suffering, the losses of livelihood and the heartbreaking destruction of small businesses, Melbourne’s gift to Australia, its unique contribution to social exclusivity and communal disunity, has being forging ahead unhampered by the legislative strictures that have shut down just about everything else. I refer to the Pride Centre in beachside St Kilda, a monument to the power of the gay, lesbian, trans etc. establishment in contemporary Victoria. Its progress is worth recording as an example of how not everything in Victoria has been put on hold. That tends to depend on who you know, and the Pride Centre has powerful connections in high places.

It is now moving towards its opening ceremony. Already some of the interiors of the grandiose new temple of divisiveness have been put on display on its website (“supported by the Government of Victoria” at taxpayer expense) for the public to admire. Though as an edifice designed by cutting-edge architects it will be ipso facto described as iconic, the building is nothing to write home about aesthetically, its principal feature being a series of round and oviform holes, one above the other, jumbled together to make a facade. It looks like a piece of Swiss cheese in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. 

Nor is it felicitously located. On its doorstep in Fitzroy Street—formerly Melbourne’s most “cosmopolitan” avenue and now rubbish-strewn and melancholy, the doorways of its abandoned restaurants and shops locked with the mail piling up inside—homeless representatives of our inaccurately designated “first nations” congregate, some slumbering, others engaged in unseemly squabbles or hurling invective at passers-by. It’s unlikely that the highly placed members of the Pride Centre board (bureaucratic mandarins, banking panjandrums, legal hotshots, all presided over by veteran trouper Jude Munro AO, a hangover from the flower-powery era of “Gay Lib”) and their grand guests will wish to encounter these inconvenient citizens as they step from their expensive cars for the opening ceremony.

This will create a quandary. On the one hand the local authority, the Port Phillip City Council, which is responsible for streets and public places, is second to none in its aspirations to “inclusivity” and its protestations of “respect” for the various “nations” to which these unfortunate down-and-outs belong. Each edition of the council’s vapid local magazine Divercity (get it?) piously “acknowledges” that Aborigines somehow have custody over the land the municipality stands on. The Pride Centre even has an Aboriginal board member, though not a homeless one, Dr Vanessa Lee-Ahmat “from the Yupungathi and Meriam people”, who in her day job is one of the army of toilers in the ever-fertile field of opposing “domestic and family violence” (that’ll be violence by men, of course). On the other hand, you can’t have the street-dwellers greeting the gathered dignitaries with picturesque epithets or throwing bottles. You can’t have the Pride Centre’s designer-clad membership stepping over their recumbent forms on their way inside to a “tomboy party” or to make a quick visit to Be Who You Are (“clothing and makeup support for transgender women all ages 16+”). That would be just, well, too inclusive.

The LGBTI and so on “community”, as an allegedly persecuted minority, is a paid-up component of the Left, and the Left is a vipers’ pit of competing “identities”. In any given skirmish you need to know which identity trumps which. For example, for feminists does a woman’s right not be genitally mutilated trump a Muslim’s right to mutilate? (Usually not is the answer, though if this were a Christian practice there’d be feminist shrieks that it was the most barbaric thing imaginable.) In the case of the Pride Centre the issue is less clear, but the smart money is on the council finding a way to disencumber the centre’s showy elliptical portals and send the homeless packing (not that they have anything but a few grubby blankets to pack).

This is because this particular municipality has form. Some years ago the then local authority in St Kilda decided that itinerant Aborigines gathering on public land near the beach where they could use the lavatories were in the way of a “beautification” scheme for the benefit of rich new residents moving into its expensively gentrified streets. The council pulled down the lavatories and the Aborigines disappeared. There are no lavatories outside the Pride Centre (there will presumably be sumptuous ones inside) but doubtless some other stratagem will be found for bundling the “first nations” folk off stage. Cheerfully co-operating with this will be Victoria’s aggressively politicised police, keen marchers in gay parades but hopelessly compromised by, among other things, trying to frame George Pell and exploiting the relationship of trust between a lawyer and her clients.

One might wonder why the sexually diverse need a “centre” to exhibit their “pride”. Why do they want to divide themselves from their fellow citizens and create a kind of sexual apartheid, with what the website describes as a “permanent home for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI) organisations in Victoria”? Homosexuals are not a race or a cult or a religion. They are, according to their activists, a normal part of the community. They are protected by law from the faintest whisper of “discrimination” or “homophobia”. They made such a song and dance about their “equality” with everyone else that the definition of marriage had to be changed after thousands of years so that no gay or lesbian was excluded from it. They demand to be seen—quite rightly—as ordinary individuals who just happen to have a different sexual preference from the majority of their co-citizens. Why do they require a publicly funded monument to themselves as though they were a tribe apart? Why turn back the clock by constructing an edifice that by its very existence reinstates discrimination, albeit in the opposite direction from the way it used to be?

The whole saga encapsulates the hypocrisy of identity politics. The homeless have no political or social clout. The gay establishment has, and money too; its members could have paid for their new clubhouse themselves, but government and councils rushed to chip in to advertise official support for “diversity”, perhaps the most damaging of our current social pathologies. Yet where’s the diversity nowadays in being “queer”, “non-binary” or even trans? It’s the defenders of old-fashioned normality who are out of step now; indeed they are criminalised if they fall foul of Victoria’s new “conversion” prohibition bill, a product if ever there was one of what the US philosopher Camille Paglia has identified as the obsession with homosexuality common to declining civilisations like ours.

If, as the Left never tires of bleating, sexual discrimination is a social evil, so is the lavishing of public money on such a divisive project. This same municipality that hasn’t a clue how many homeless are sleeping in its streets had the nerve to contribute the equivalent of $13 million to the Pride Centre by donating the land. It could have provided many beds in shelters for that. The Victorian government’s gift of $15 million would have paid for a lot more. But what’s that compared with funding a “beautiful, safe and inclusive place” where (if you’re lucky enough to be included) you can sit and sip a Queer Coffee all day and witter on about social justice?

Christopher Akehurst is a frequent contributor