Pride

Yesterday was Pride Sunday in a lot of places. I saw a lot of people running around in Mardi Gras drag, some of whom I suspect were utterly clueless as to what it was, precisely, that they were supposed to be celebrating, other than just being gay (and God knows, if you're young and beautiful, that is ABSOLUTELY ENOUGH).

My colleague in bloggorhea, Jake over at NoFo, has a wonderful piece today about what it is that we LGBT's have to be proud about. It's a good list and a good piece. You should read it. Jake's a fabulous writer.

I've enumerated here before why I no longer make the long march down Fifth anymore, so I'm not going to go over that again.

But it might be worthwhile to recall just how things actually were after midnight, on the early morning of June 28th, 1969, the night of the 1st Stonewall Riot. And to recall the events which led up to it.

This Wikipedia entry is a very good primer on the history of GLF (Gay Liberation Front). Check it out and take a few minutes to remember how things were in those days.

I wasn't present that Saturday morning of the riot. My first visit to a gay bar still lay a year or so in my future. But I was having my first legal drink that night. I was in the Navy and a newly minted Petty Officer Third Class.

But in part because of what happened that night, within the next 3 years I would come out of the Navy and out of the closet to friends and family alike. By the fall of 1972 I would be the newly elected President of the Gay Community of the University of Delaware and would spend the next few years marching in a lot of protest marches... not just in New York, but in Columbus (Ohio), Washington (DC), Philadelphia and sundried other places. I would also meet my first boyfriend, a beautiful blond named Rick whose heart I would quickly break, at a Saturday night dance at the GLF Firehouse at 99 Wooster Street down in SoHo. We met in October of 1972.

I still carry a torch for him.

Later on I felt hurt when a number of lesbians, our sisters in liberation, started to recuse themselves from participating in the the largely male dominated GLF groups in various cities and universities. But I understood it. I went out of my way during those years to fully identify my innate heterosexism, patriarchal thinking and racial bias. If I wanted liberation for myself, then I had to be willing to grant it, unconditionally, to others.

Could I have done more? Oh God, yes. I hardly scratched the surface of what I could and should have done. It always seemed that everyone else was doing so much more.

But I did a lot. And I'm pretty proud of that.

So even though I don't march down Fifth Avenue anymore, this year's marchers, whether they know it or not, are following in my footsteps and the footsteps of thousands of other older gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people who made that same trek downtown, numerous times, 30+ years ago.

And that's a very good thing. Something, in fact, to be proud of.

Cheap Tarts

I looked at two condos last night. Naturally I fell in love with the cheap tart who wore a lot of makeup. Gay guys always have a soft-spot in their hearts for the Hooker with the Heart of Gold.

Here's a picture of the living room.

I fell in love with the paint job.

I looked at another condo in the same development, but it sucked. It has a fireplace, but it also has cathedral ceilings which, as far as I'm concerned, are a total waste of perfectly good heat.

I didn't hide my excitement at this place from my real estate agent. That poor woman has been sending me e-mails of listings three times a week for nearly a year. I'm sure she'd given up hope that I'd ever buy anything.

The place has a huge master bedroom with a walk-in closet about the size of my old apartment on East 78th Street in Manhattan. It's also got a nice guestroom/home office, two complete baths, a decent kitchen and a balcony with an outdoor gas line feed in case I go totally ape-shit suburban and buy a Weber grill this summer.

Oh, and it's the building closest to the community pool (fees included in the monthly HOA fee).

I told Ann (my RE agent) "I'd sleep on it." She didn't let me escape, however, before giving me the name and number of a mortgage broker she might be having an affair with. I promised I'd call him. I just didn't say when.

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And speaking of Cheap Tarts, I see that NY Pride didn't get it's wish to get a permit to move this year's festivities from Christopher Street (why in God's name would we want to have it there, where the Stonewall is actually located?) uptown to Chelsea (where all the gay boys currently live so the poor babies wouldn't have to actually MARCH down Fifth Avenue and ruin their pedicures in the process AND more importantly and only incidentally, it's where all the gay businesses are located these days).

Listen. I haven't marched in a so-called NY Pride Parade since 1978 and I'll tell you why. I did march in them in 1972 and 1973, when they were still totally disorganized and vaguely threatening to the peace and tranquility of New York City. We marched wherever the hell we wanted to march and we didn't have marshals or police escorts in order to do it. We just marched. And the cops were too friggin' afraid to do anything about it because, frankly, they'd never seen 200,000 queers in one place before and although they were used to terrorizing a bar full of drag queens, there wasn't a whole lot they could do about an entire avenue full of scruffy looking, leftist-leaning, college students and radical faeries.

It was wonderful to march in those days (72-73).

Then I got busy and didn't march in 74 or 75 and by 76 I was moving to Seattle. When I got back to New York, in '78, the parade had changed. I marched that year, but now there were marshals, telling us where we could, and couldn't march. I felt sold out. I felt co-opted. I felt like the "movement" had been had by the establishment. And when we finally got down Fifth to Christopher that year, I knew I was right. For there, lining both sides of the streets, were booth after booth, of beer by the gallon.

And I thought, "Gee, what we really need now is a big banner hanging over Christopher Street proclaiming:

"PRIDE - BROUGHT TO YOU BY BUD LITE"

And that was the last time I marched in a New York Pride Parade (I did march in the LA parade in 1995, but that's a different story for another time).

If you're feeling "pride" this year, do something radical aside from buying beer or t-shirts.

Elect a politician who'll actually do something for us.