Pride is for Poors Now

GONZO

No Party for Rich Men

By Ancient Problemz · June 29, 2026 · 7 min read

Depending on your preferred brand of rage bait, you might associate Pride Month with a combination of bondage, nauseating rainbow aesthetics, traumatized children, and national mortgage lenders competing for your heart and email address. Depending on which city you’re in, you may still encounter any number of these elements stocking your downtown like musical zombies, but to gays’ credit, it seems like they’re dialing back the theatrics in a chill and admirable way. Although it’s always possible the conveniently anonymous tip against Mayor Pete to Child Protective Services is just the next evolution of left wing hate hoaxes so much of our politics and civil rights are built on.

But opinions are cheap and there are infinite Libs of TikTok-style accounts stoking rage against the rainbow people. If you want to know what Pride is actually like, you gotta go to the gay party in-person. The Mount Rushmore of men infiltrating the vibrant underworld of disco and divas includes definitely-not-gay citizen journalist James O’Keefe, Gaëtan Dugas (AKA Patient 0), and none other than the world’s favorite epidemiologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who spent so much of the 80s in bathhouses that he was able to reproduce several Kama Sutras worth of sex material for NIH. It isn’t realistic to expect everyone to wear a wire to the steam room at their nearest Equinox or spend weeks honeypotting government officials like O’Keefe does, so this year I decided to carve my fat, podcast ass onto the Mount Rushmore of Gay Studies and do some real anthropology for the sophisticated retards who read this magazine. I went to Pride to check my priors against the real deal, to see if there’s actually been any drawdown in the Bank of America cunty yas queen energy that seemed so insufferable during the last decade. It was time to see what it’s all about.

It’s 57 years after Stonewall, 56 years after the first Pride Parade, and almost 11 years after Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn. While I was expecting leather daddies, drag shows, political grandstanding and all the kinds of lesbian that don’t really do it for me, it mostly came off like an overpriced block party filled with migrant vendors selling greasy concessions and strong drinks to a chunky but happy crowd of lower middle class people schvitzing to the beat.

Naturally, I brought my 4’11” wife with me for protection lest any feral gays try to tackle me and give me a makeover. When we arrived, we parked on the top floor of a garage and shared the elevator with two chunky brunettes who looked more like orchestra lesbians than softball ones. They were artsy if a little frumpy, one wearing a long olive skort and black top while carrying a hot pink umbrella and peach Stanley tumbler, the other wearing dark mom jeans and a light pink top with a tote bag big enough for a rifle. A wiggerish Latino with a baby blue pup-play themed shorts and t-shirt combo stood between them whining about the rain. He wore sandals, a black backpack with the straps all the way up, and a black baseball hat. Middle-aged but dressed like their foster child.

When my wife and I tried to enter the official grounds, several pancake-tittied goons stopped us, letting us know we’d need to pay up, their nipples poking through their soggy banana-colored t-shirts like antennae. I asked the main enforcer with the sloping forehead and Shrek body if they were really going to make us pay for Pride but my emotional manipulation was no match for this queen’s dead eyes and slack jaw. Five minutes and $34 later, I still had to download an app just to get the tickets. I was about to go full Omar Mateen when the tickets finally popped up on my screen. It had just poured. The temperature was pushing 90 and my balls were firmly glued to my thigh but we were in.

As we cleared the gates we saw a group of four people ahead of us led by a stout chicana woman with a mullet, fishnets, and pink panties who looked like a broke man’s Peaches. She led them to another group of people walking around in furry masks. Some had pastel hair poking out from underneath. Some wore punk clothes like jean jackets covered in patches while others wore rave gear. Despite the rain and the heat they just had to put cosplay on cosplay. All of them looked extremely online and way too dumb to be baristas but absolutely none of these people were on a float, none of them had a microphone, and none of them were exposing themselves beyond the edges of the chicana girl’s pale buttcheeks and then a few other women’s buttcheeks I managed to snap.

While alcohol doesn’t change everything, it can change a lot. And the affair got a whole lot more tolerable once my wife got us a $26 pina colada and the tunes started. Some stud, whose name I didn’t catch, emceed the event, and while a little annoying with her inauthentic Obama voice and Lil Bow Wow demeanor, she mostly shut up while the music played and people danced.

Gay, straight, or anything else, the place didn’t have a lot of lookers in attendance. The body-types are the same you see at the zoo or any other place people without degrees take their kids, but these people were showing favela levels of skin. Anyone who’s even seen pictures of renaissance fairs, offroad parks, or the Gathering of the Juggalos can only imagine what adding gender dysphoria and a Lisa Frank color palette does for the vibe.

The following week I caught up with a power gay I’m friends with. He explained how Pride is mostly for poor, ugly gays who can’t afford $250 tickets plus hotel and airfare to hit warehouse raves in New York and who aren’t getting invited to anyone’s private poolside orgies either.

“Pride is basically free but all the good events cost a little money. So who are you going to get at Pride? Poor gays.”

In the same way that classier straight people might hit Martha’s Vineyard or The Hampton’s for the 4th of July, high end gays are not going to waste their time on Grimace-shaped people drinking diabetes drinks at Houston Pride. On the flip side, I’m much more of a midget wrestling kind of guy than a Hampton’s guy, so it was kind of nice being surrounded by the proudly retarded gays who are a little ugly and don’t give a fuck.

“Look, coke, GHB, flights, they all cost something and it’s enough to keep out the uggos and poor guys. If you want someone good-looking to suck your dick, you’re going to need to go to a circuit party and not a street fair.”

There’s a blessing for Jewish men that goes, “Thank G-d for not making me a woman, a gentile or a slave.” But when I walk around Pride and I see women so excited to dance with their asses hanging out, goys eating greasy, sloppy burgers, and people who look like total slaves grabbing every koozie they can get their hands on, I wonder if they don’t just have more fun.

Pride isn’t that bad. Does anyone look attractive? Not really. Is the weather good? Not usually. Would I go if I was actually gay? Probably not. But I respect any group of people who backs off their group-narcissism. Like every other American holiday, Pride has become a celebration for the people closest to the poverty line and farthest away from the American Dream. Used to be you could take your family to a baseball game, buy a few boxes of cracker jacks, and get blown by a hot boxcar hobo from Kansas in a handicap stall all while still maintaining your mortgage and marriage. In the Age of Ozempic, at least you can take them to Pride every June. While it probably feels really good to hop on a flight to a meth orgy on the other side of the country, it’s nice to know there’s still something for the little guy with big bones. In the words of James St. James in Party Monster:

“It doesn’t matter what you look like. I mean, if you have a hunchback, just throw a little glitter on it, honey. Go dancing.”