Much as this might strike some as "victim mentality", the fact remains that it is only against something like it that the notion of "Pride" becomes intelligible at all. Why else would we need to say that we are proud of being gay? What else does the notion of a "Gay Pride" betray if not the fact that for a long time we didn't like ourselves at all?
So, Pride would seem to necessarily rely on an acknowledgment of the past and of the damage it caused us. It celebrates our escape from the closet but it does not for one second lose sight of it.
Yet to understand Pride in this way is surely to problematise our current predicament as a community. For, increasingly, both the notion of Pride and its underlying project of a lesbian and gay Community find themselves submerged in a hedonistic phenomenon that only rarely by now coincides with them. I refer, of course, to Boyztown and its Non-stop Party - both of them places where the past is not allowed to exist.
The appeal of Boyztown and its fantasies lies precisely in the denial that we have all come from a wounded place. Most importantly, perhaps, it lies in the denial of the effect which that wounded place has on us still. As fully paid-up members of Boyztown (and membership, by the way, does not come cheap) we are supposed to be strong, sussed individuals - as well as, of course, irresistibly desirable and fashionable. And if anyone's in doubt there's always "attitude" to prove to one another how cool and self-sufficient we all really are. What's more, in order for this denial of the past and its influence to be truly successful, it needs to extend to a denial that others may still be suffering. Thus the "Oh, things aren't so bad nowadays, I can't see why activists are still making such a fuss about it all". Thus the "Being gay is not about politics, it is about having fun!".
Stripped of its connection to our personal and collective histories, Pride becomes a bizarre "celebration" in which no-one can quite remember what we are supposed to be celebrating. It ceases to speak to our Dignity because it is neither honest nor courageous enough to confront the truly awful reality of what it is to be queer in our culture, nor the true precariousness of our much-lauded "Freedom".
Instead Pride becomes an absurd, meaningless spectacle of ourselves as "fabulous, fashionable creatures". A relentless, embarrassing pageant to the fact that, as certain queer listings magazines never tire to tell us, "we have the best clubs, the best music, the best, most gorgeous, 'club celebrities'" (much as I find Momma Yvette very gorgeous, I fail to see why I should feel proud of her).
And the result shows, not only in the way we treat one another but in the shallowness of so much that passes off as "Queer Culture": in our mock-radical hyper-perverse posturings, in the almost unbelievable mediocrity of a cultural scene that doesn't find it necessary to go beyond mere shock tactics in order to elicit our dutiful, jaded applause.
Now I know that to conceive of Pride in such terms could simply be dismissed as "naff". The demand that we confront the immense psychological damage wrecked upon us, both as individuals and as a community and that we dare dwell on the painful, "non-party" side of our experience, is bound to be dismissed in some quarters as retrograde and slightly embarrassing. It all smacks of the kind of early community strategies we all thought we had left behind - the sort of project once expressed through slogans like "Gay is Good".
Yet the irony is that although few of us would wish to be associated with such embarrassing devices nowadays, we do not, in fact, seem to have moved beyond them. "Gay is Good" might be difficult to say without blushing by now but the truth is that twenty-six years after Stonewall most of us are still doing no more than celebrating the sheer fact of our existence, our mere survival, in a way that betrays the same hurt and the same "naff" need for reassurance.
"Gay is Good" might be out of fashion. But secretly, we continue to say it to ourselves with Freedom rings and Rainbow flags; with moments of communal bliss on the dance floor, tripping our heads off on "love-doves"; with belt-buckles and T-shirts "proudly" proclaiming the fact that we have "SEX".
The point is not so much that we are still merely living our the slogans GLF politicos gave us 25 years ago (although, in a sense, I can see why that in itself ought to worry us). It is the fact that we are not even honest enough to admit to it - let alone do justice to the broader vision such slogans were once part of.
The Party has become so alluring, its promises so seductive, that we have forgotten about the rest of the agenda. We have forgotten that our communal revelries were never supposed to be an end in themselves but merely the celebratory aspect of a project whose essence had always been unashamedly political; one whereby lesbians and gay men came together not only to celebrate their survival but also in order to better their predicament, themselves and one another - thus strengthening the Community and deepening its politics.
Instead, The Party promotes the idea that Pride and Freedom can be had instantly and on the cheap. It promises us the multicoloured rainbow at the end of what was always supposed to be a long, arduous process in return for doing nothing more that consuming export beer and looking fabulous.
Beneath it all, meanwhile, we remain as fucked up as ever. Still desperately attempting to heal the alienation we continue to feel at the centre of our lives but everywhere presented with only cheap, fraudulent remedies.
Nowhere is this more evident than in our enthusiastic adoption of Ecstasy as an emotional prop.
E may have enabled us to acknowledge that we had always wanted to feel close to one another; that - deep down - we had never really enjoyed the whole "attitude" thing; that the scene and much of what passed off as Community had always been a dismal place full of fucked up, bitter people.
But as a friend of mine put it to me after a police raid meant there was no E to be had at the Fridge one Saturday night: "My tolerance levels just dropped. Most people I talked to got on my nerves. On E I would have empathised with them, enjoyed their presence; without it, they just pissed me off".
E may possibly have given us some powerful emotional insights into our predicament. But it would be dishonest to pretend that such experiences could by themselves ever amount to a solution.
It is not that I'm trying to spoil anybody's fun. I just wish that after 25 years we could be courageous enough not to have to settle for such blatantly counterfeit models of the ideals that once spurred us on.
Most dangerously, it is the fact that our hedonism increasingly runs the risk of becoming a tool in the service of those who would rather we stopped rocking the boat and settled for "lifestyles" instead of full, dignified and therefore inevitably politicised lives.
With the prospect of a Blair victory on the horizon and Stonewall's promise that our monthly standing orders will gain us "full equality in 5 years", things may never have looked rosier.
But, more than ever, we need to ensure that such hollow optimism does not become an excuse for relaxing our political responsibilities towards the sorts of problems which - Blair or no Blair - are unlikely to improve in the near future.
It may be uncomfortable to dwell on the lingering influence of the closet in our lives, or on the increasingly violent responses to our visibility, or on the profound, quiet, devastation which AIDS continues to spread throughout the breadth and depth of gay male experience.
But it was by wrestling with such issues that much of the tremendous political energy of the last ten years has been generated - and with it much of our new-found sense of strength and confidence as a community.
Inasmuch as certain aspects of our oppression could be said to be improving, we should be developing new and imaginative strategies appropriate to our changing predicament, rather than settle for agendas imposed from above by professional politicians - gay or straight.
Above all, we should be daring to recognise - now History seems to have given us a breather - that however fabulous being gay might be, we have also been deeply fucked-up by the experience.
Rather than resigning ourselves to the meagre comforts on offer, we should be deepening our awareness of our needs - if only to realise how few of them we have managed to accommodate within existing community structures.
Instead of celebrating the increasingly tired joys of our commercial scene, we should be daring to focus on the many things we have never yet dared ask of one another.
But before any of this is possible, we must begin by casting our minds back to what it was that made us want to come together in the first place. We must go back to the Past in order to be worthy of a future.
Only by daring to reconnect with those early dreams and hopes will we ever achieve a true lesbian and gay community and, with it, the true sense of belonging which I know E to be nothing but a poor substitute for. And the point, of course, is that to get there there are no short-cuts. It is a hard, painful slog; the hard, painful slog of any community that has had to come to terms with a horrific history in order to face a future beyond the deeply internalised demons of the past. (I think of the Black community here, I think also of the Jews).
We are now at a crossroads in our development as a community. This is the crucial point where we could take that leap. After 25 years, I would like to believe that we are adult enough a community to be able to take it and move beyond the non-stop party that tells us again and again, and still, that "Gay is Good" and that that is the end of the matter. But it will take a communal effort and a colossal one at that. We don't necessarily need to abandon the Party altogether, merely begin by acknowledging that, for too many of us, it has become an excuse for not growing; that "Gay", by itself, is simply not good enough - nor was it ever supposed to be.
Perhaps most urgently, we might begin by noting and resisting the extension of the Party's crass infantilism, not only into physical spaces that were once the site of friction, imagination and defiance (the Pride March and Festival, Soho) but also, increasingly, into those cultural spaces which shape the very way we look at ourselves (our press in particular).
Short of such measures, the community will degenerate into a party that cannot stop, because the misery that drives us onto it is not being consciously dealt with; a self-perpetuating, neurotic attempt at exorcising the past and the more unpalatable aspects of our present, by denying their continuing presence in our lives.
It is ultimately our duty towards those who will follow us to reinvigorate and rework that kernel of dignity intrinsic to Pride into something that will continue to attract and empower other. It was, after all, this promise of a possibility of coming to terms with ourselves and with our past, that attracted all of us into this bizarre historical experiment called the "lesbian and gay community" in the first place.
At the beginning of this piece, I began by talking about the memory of pain as an intrinsic constituent of Pride. I did so not because I believe that our future lies in collective 12 step programmes, or in the creation of a "victim culture", but because I know that an awareness of damage is the only way we have of re-fueling our politics. Pain is political and politics - however construed - the inescapable duty of all lesbian and gay men in our culture.