Stonewall was a riot. Gays, trans people, drag queens and people of colour who had finally had enough of being raided, beaten and humiliated, fought back against the police in the early hours of a June morning in 1969.
What they were fighting for, underneath everything, was the right to feel good in public. The right to dance together, touch each other, exist in bodies that the world had told them to hide.
Pride, at its root, was never really about visibility. It was about the right to our own pleasure. The simple, radical pleasure of being yourself among your own people, without apology.
Pleasure has always been political. Every system of control throughout history has understood one thing instinctively. A person who has full access to their own joy, their own body, their own aliveness is much harder to control. Shame is cheap to install and expensive to remove.
Once a person believes their body is wrong, their desire is dirty, their pleasure is dangerous, they police themselves. No more raids required.
That’s what was done to us for generations. And many of us are still doing it to ourselves.
I see it constantly in my work with Pleasure Medicine, my conscious connection workshop and sober ecstatic dance for gay and queer men…
Men who can talk fluently about politics, identity and rights, but who freeze the moment they’re asked to feel something in their own body without performing, without the masks or without substances or a drink.
Men who can be devastatingly witty at a party and completely unable to connect vulnerably and honestly.
Men who learned early that their desire needed to be hidden, managed, or numbed, and who are now, decades later, still doing exactly that.
This is the shadow side nobody puts on a float. The addiction many of us carry, not always to substances, sometimes to validation, to apps, to the performance of “being just fine”.
There is a loneliness that lives underneath a packed calendar of parties. And there is an isolation of being constantly surrounded by other gay men and still feeling like nobody actually knows you.
We have built incredible visibility. But we haven’t yet built genuine intimacy, community and connection.
Pleasure, when it’s avoided or numbed long enough, doesn’t disappear. It goes underground and comes back distorted, as compulsion, as disconnection, as a body you live in but rarely embody.
But here’s the other side, the beautiful side, because there is one, and it’s important.
When pleasure is reclaimed properly, slowly, consciously, in community, something changes in a deep way. I’m seeing it in my Pleasure Medicine community…
The body that was taught to be ashamed learns it’s allowed to feel good and express joyfully.
The nervous systems that have been braced for years gradually soften.
I see men who haven’t danced freely since they were children, and remember that their bodies are capable of joy. They’d just been told for so long to keep it contained.
This is what pleasure done right looks like. Real connection with other men, built on something more honest than pretending or performance.
This is exactly why I built Pleasure Medicine.
Every fortnight in London, gay and queer men gather sober, in the daylight, to dance, connect and practise exactly this kind of reclamation. No alcohol to borrow courage from. No masks needed.
Connection is facilitated so you don’t have to guess your way through.
And there is music, movement and a room full of gay and queer men willing to do things differently.
It started small just over a year ago. It’s grown into one of the most vital community spaces I know of for gay men who are tired of choosing between visibility and intimacy, and want both.
People arrive nervous, unsure how to be in a room without a drink in hand. They leave having had the best time they can remember!
This Pride, we’re running a special edition of Pleasure Medicine on 4th July; a celebration that holds everything Stonewall was actually fighting for.
Pleasure was always political. It’s time we treated it that way again!
With Love & Pleasure, Gary x
Find out more and join us at www.pleasuremedicine.co.uk
