Speaker & Worship Leader:- Ruby Johnson
This week’s service will take some wisdom given to us by our late minister, Clay Nelson, and apply this to Auckland Pride month. A church, as it turns out, is a lot like a Pride march. What role do each of these play in 2025?
Video to come
Audio to come
Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.
Ruby Johnson © 9 February 2025
Read below, or download the PDF
This past Wednesday we celebrated Waitangi Day. I’m sure many of you will agree with me when I say that this year’s celebrations were somewhat marred by the presence of an elephant in the room: The Treaty Principles Bill. At the moment I find myself frequently reminded of the ugly and racially divisive general election of 2005, during which I was 15 – not old enough to vote, but old enough to be paying attention. National’s slogan for the election was “Kiwi, not Iwi”, which it utilised to stoke resentments about then-recent Treaty settlements. It was a cynical political ploy to frame te ao Māori as inherently separate from and opposed to the beliefs and values that characterise Aotearoa.
Being from a white, conservative family on the North Shore, you can imagine the kinds of things I heard around the dining room table during that election cycle. I am hearing a lot of those same things from members of the current government. The “Kiwi, not Iwi” approach did not carry the day in 2005, and I am encouraged to be able to say that I don’t think it will carry the day now. However, this isn’t a given. We need to stay engaged and ready to defend the pluralistic nature of our society. The second of our Unitarian Universalist principles is: Justice, equity and compassion in human relations. I believe that upholding this obligates us to make our voices heard.
Keeping with the theme of the second principle, our main topic for the week is Auckland Pride Month. When I first attended this church I was struck by its openness to the queer community, and particularly by the warmth and compassion of our late minister, Clay Nelson. There are two particular quotes which I heard spoken by Clay which particularly affected me.
The first is as follows: “A church is not a club. It is an open and welcoming community.”
The second quote was adapted from the journalist Finley Peter Dunne: “The job of a church is to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.” This quote originally referred to the purpose of newspapers rather than churches, and was in fact intended to be rather biting satire. Regardless, I like Clay’s adaptation of the quote and I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment he was trying to get across. Keep these two sentiments in mind as we continue with today’s service.
Main Topic: Pride is Not a Club
When I moved from the North Shore to the central city, one of the main motivators was to be near the centre of Auckland’s queer community. In the East Coast Bays where I grew up, there were very few overt signs of queer life. In and around Ponsonby and Karangahape Road, these signs are everywhere. No time is that more obvious than during Auckland Pride Month. I love Pride. Some days I wander about, just people-watching. There are so many weird and wonderful people that make up the fabric of this area. During Pride, they are all out in force – and now, I get to be one of them. This church is a part of that fabric as well. We really are in the centre of it all.
The main event of any Pride celebration is arguably the parade, which in Auckland passes every year right by the church. Many of you will know that over the last few years, this parade has been the subject of considerable controversy within the queer community itself. To summarise briefly: several years ago, the New Zealand Police asked to be allowed to march in the Auckland Pride parade in full uniform. This was a big deal for a lot of people. Within living memory, homosexuality was illegal in Aotearoa. Many queer people have extremely negative experiences with uniformed police officers, even today. Yes, some police officers are themselves queer, but many of us felt that for them to be marching in their official capacity as law enforcement was inappropriate. There is a common saying: “The first pride was a riot.” Well, the police were on the other side of that riot.
The result of all this was a fracturing of the pride board into two organisations, running two separate events. The original Pride board now organises an event called the “Pride March” which runs down Queen Street, and has, for lack of a better term, a more “activist” tone. The newer breakaway Pride organisation runs the Ponsonby Road Pride parade: this is the event which allows uniformed Police and Corrections officers to attend. I attended the parade a couple of times before it split, and for the past two years, I’ve attended and enjoyed both events. However, I have to say that I found it harder to enjoy the parade last year. Its faults were much more evident than its virtues.
There is a term that gets thrown around a lot within the queer community these days: “Corporate Pride”. When an organisation decides to pander to queer people for one month out of the year, but maintains the status quo for the other 11 months, that’s “Corporate Pride”. It’s slimy, it’s insincere, and it’s everywhere during Pride month now. As queer people have gained greater societal acceptance, businesses, political parties, and state agencies have clamoured to show that they deserve our money, our votes, and our trust. Most of what I saw at last year’s Ponsonby Road parade was, in my opinion, “Corporate Pride”.
Pride parades used to be something deeply subversive and taboo. In some places, they still are. They represent an oppressed subsection of society fighting for its right to live. In many places, including Aotearoa, past generations of queer folks dreamed of a day where they would be able to safely hold hands with their partner in public, or dress as they wished without fear of violence. These weren’t mainstream events. Businesses and politicians didn’t want to sully themselves by being associated with a community whose intimate lives were prohibited by law. This same prohibition meant that law enforcement was in attendance as a purely antagonistic, oppressive force. People whose lives were rendered invisible chanted slogans like “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”.
Well, now it’s 2025 and much of society has “gotten used to it”. All of these organisations that would have never touched a Pride parade in past decades are now in full attendance. Ruby, you ask me, what are you complaining about? Isn’t it great that all of these groups are comfortable with queer people now? So I ask you in return: Is a pride parade really the appropriate place for “comfort?” I believe that Clay was right about churches, and I would extend what he said to include queer Pride: “The purpose of Pride is to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.”
It’s fantastic that Pride is so accepted now. It really is. Sometimes, when I see how many people are out there, openly and authentically living their lives, I get teary-eyed. That’s “comforting the afflicted” in its purest form. But how can we “afflict the comfortable”, if we uncritically allow the comfortable to cosy up to us? During the last parade, I saw several ministers from the current government marching. One of them smiled at me, and I smiled back. Because that’s polite. That’s amiable. That’s comfortable. But in 2021, when the last government moved to ban gay conversion therapy, that same minister (then in opposition) voted against the ban, in line with his party’s position. His private messages were leaked to the press, in which he said that he “hated” making this vote on the issue. I’m sorry, but feeling guilty about your vote doesn’t absolve you of having made it. The bill passed, thankfully, but presumably it wouldn’t have if the present government had been in charge in 2021. How am I supposed to afflict this man’s comfort, if the Pride board is busy bending over backwards to make him comfortable?
Clay’s other quote can also be applied to queer Pride: “A church is not a club. It is an open and welcoming community.” On one level, what Clay was warning against here was churches becoming insular, and with that reading it may appear hypocritical of me to apply this quote to the parade. After all, expressing my displeasure with this or that group being a part of Pride celebrations is implicitly a call to exclude those groups. That’s not very “open and welcoming”. However, I’ve always taken this warning against becoming “a club” to have a secondary meaning: that a church can’t just be a place where friends get together to hang out. It has to have a social purpose.
I think that the Auckland Pride parade has largely abandoned its social purpose, and that this is down to prioritising the comfort of various business, political, and state organisations. The impetus for this is simple: money. You can make your club bigger and more flashy when powerful people are willing to pay for it. Yes, pride should be open and welcoming to all people. But, as much as the US legal system might disagree with me: corporations aren’t people. Political parties aren’t people. Law enforcement organisations aren’t people. These groups are all made up of individuals who should feel welcome to attend the parade. Yes, even that one government minister. But the organisations themselves don’t have any right to be there. Allowing them to buy their way in is an active detriment to Pride’s social purpose.
Prioritising the comfort of these groups, making the parade uncontroversial and family friendly, actually makes it less open and welcoming to those who are afflicted and in need of comfort. How can we speak truth to power when the powerful are footing the bill? Perhaps in a roundabout way, the split between the parade and the march was a good thing. The Queen Street march is now free of all the business elements that held the old parade back from being relevant and radical. It doesn’t have to bend over backwards to appease the people paying the bills. Speakers can champion their causes without fear that a sponsor will pull out in retaliation.
Even so, the attitude represented by the Ponsonby Road parade does concern me. An attitude that says “mission accomplished”, that there are not more battles to be fought. This is dangerous. Queer people have made great strides in Aotearoa, but with rising reactionary forces both within our government and in the wider world, now is not the time to be complacent. Our gains need to be safeguarded, and I’m not sure what part there is to play in that for a glorified street party. A club.
So, that was our main talk for the week, and what I’m about to say is the epilogue: everything I just said (barring a few edits), was written nearly a year ago. I got ill two days before I was due to give last year’s Pride month service, and had to pull out. The caution that I expressed then about the need to safeguard our gains has proved prescient, especially looking at the international situation. I hate to say I told you so, but…well. Since Trump’s reelection, we have seen the entire executive branch of the US government completely roll back its accommodations for trans people, with many US federal agencies instructed to do similar. If I lived in the United States, I would be unable to get a driver’s license or passport that matches the way I live my life day to day. This is all aided and abetted by business leaders, who at this moment are busy cozying up to power, allowing hate speech on their platforms, and generally rolling back support for queer people. They were never interested in being part of, as Clay put it “an open and welcoming community”. They were interested in sponsoring a social club, in the hopes that it would make them look good. I think that over the last three months, we have witnessed the death knell of “Corporate Pride”, and I have to be honest and say: good riddance.
Now, I would like to offer my apologies to you all, particularly the American members of our congregation, because that was thoroughly depressing. I do think there is every reason to be hopeful about the future though. I place my faith, not in businesses and sponsorships, but in open and welcoming communities like ours.
Links
Reading:- “Things Haunt” by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Closing Words:- from “The rise of queer joy” by Jenny Rockwell
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