Pride cometh (sorry, cummeth) before the fall.

Last Saturday afternoon I went to the local Pride Fair.

It was KCG's idea to go, and he sold it as having "stalls and entertainment and handbag dogs", and being set in a pretty park on a lovely spring day. In my mind's eye I envisaged it as your standard sort of street fair, with booths selling handicrafts and delicious little gourmet foodstuffs - two things gay men would do rather well - and crowds washing through as the mood took them, all within a carnival atmosphere. So I agreed.

The first bad sign was when I arrived at the park to find it fenced in, with a single entry point on the eastern side. There would be no anonymous wash of people for a closet case like me to lose himself in. They may as well have hung a sign over the gate reading "HOMOSEXUALS AND THEIR ENABLERS ONLY".

The second bad sign was the fact that it cost $15, each, to enter.

The third bad sign crept up on me as we wandered into the avenues of stalls. There was a stall promoting gay marriage, then one promoting safe sex, then one promoting STD checks, then one about the local Bears club, then an AIDS hospice, then another promoting safe sex, then one offering frendliness between Anglicans and gays, then another asking for yet more signatures on yet another gay marriage petition...

"Do any of these stalls sell anything cool?" I asked KCG with a narrowed glare.

"There's a donut truck over in the corner," he offered, obliviously.

Over on the main stage a choir of lesbians started singing renditions of camp classics - including 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow', naturally - and while we listened I scanned the people around me. The crowd consisted of friends and families of gay people wandering around with rainbow stickers and wide-eyed, "I'm helping!" expressions on their faces, and gay men with their heads down cruising Grindr on their iPhones. There wasn't even a lot of talent on display: just a lot of skinny, femme-y twinks in tacky outfits, a couple of leather daddies, a terrifying obese drag queen, KCG and me. The only eye candy was two hot shirtless 20-something PR bois handing out leaflets for some Pride festival activities... because apparently you can't advertise to gay men except through their groins.

After running into a couple of KCG's friends we fell to doing the only thing there was to do there: we sat down on the grass and drank. Nearby some lesbians, slaves to their sexuality, started playing football. We gay men, slaves to our sexuality, just sat around swilling pinot and looking fabulous.

I realised, as I sat on the lawn watching the lesbians run and lunge for the only ball they were likely to run and lunge for, that the Pride Fair was a holdover from an outmoded gay paradigm. Sure, it created a safe place for gays and lesbians to hang out and meet up... but there are dozens of safe places for gays and lesbians to hang out and meet up, and they're either cheaper or they offer better entertainment for the money. And you're probably less likely to meet someone new than if you just logged onto Grindr, Manhunt or Gaydar and did it from the comfort of your home. In 2011, with openly gay cabinet ministers, sporting heroes, movie stars and prime time TV characters, what's the point of creating a fenced off enclosure for gays? It's like we're here, we're queer, and we're not used to it.