Pride

Pride was awesome. We're tired from too much sun and too much dancing on concrete, but it was awesome. We planned well, we ate good food after, and Patty cracked me up, wearing a sticker she got from the Bears and saying, with great frequency "I'm a bear, grrr." This entertained not just me, but also pretty much everyone we interacted with, including the clerk at Trader Joe's.

I did note that the groups that were massive in the parade maybe a decade ago, barely seemed to exist now. The Bears numbered about twenty, the Leather Men were even fewer; in the parade of various religions, I didn't even see a pagan group (unless you count Radical Faeries) and the poly group was tiny. We didn't stay to the end, so maybe we missed certain groups, but it felt like everyone had dispersed into political causes this year, which isn't a bad thing. But it was the first time since the late-80s and early-90s, when the parade was so about the AIDS crisis, that it felt quite like this.

There were levels on which I was glad for the politics. But I did also miss the level of hot, mostly naked making out I remembered from the last couple of years. Which brings me to another point: way more sexual displays from lesbian floats this year, which I also liked, as I really do have a problem with this idea both from within and without the gay community that men party and are hot and women doing politics and scold.

There were also larger and more vocal transpeople groups this year.

General notes -- if you're representing something really specific with a small group, dress well! Choose clothes that fit you! They don't have to be formal or expensive, but man, the amount of slovenly stuff I saw on people who would have no problem finding affordable off-the-rack clothes that would fit them well and represent their thing (butches, I'm looking at you) MADE ME CRAZY.

At the dance, it rained right before we got there, and there was an actual massive rainbow in the skyline! The music wasn't my thing (not because it was modern, but because it was more hiphop than I can really get into), but it was still good to move, and I danced like a lunatic to a ridiculous mix of Michael Jackson stuff, not because I particularly liked it, but because it was familiar and easy.

Patty, btw, is ridiculously hot on the dance floor.

what you might not know about 1987

Frank Rich on Stonewall:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opinion/28rich.html

But the reason I am linking, other than it's a good piece, is that it contains a piece of trivia I suspect most of you don't know:

The New York Times did not allow the use of the word "gay" in its pages until 1987.

It's preposterously recent, and was a subject of much angst in the period of time leading up to it as the paper struggled both with obituaries and protest coverage in the midst of the AIDS crisis.

I turned 15-years-old in 1987. That's the world I grew up in. It wasn't a bunch of slashers giggling about period British novels and the love that dare not speak its name and every marketing class in the world talking about the "gay vague" strategy -- it was the fucking New York Times considering what is now the generally accepted word for my tribe as too obscene to print (And this, btw, is why I sometimes lose patience with some of the utter blitheness in fandom).

I was 15-years-old and wore second-hand men's sports coats I bought at Canal Jean Co. and lamented how they never fit me right while trying to convince my mother this was just how girls impressed boys in these strange days.

I wanted to be a journalist, in a world where the newspapers didn't allow themselves to even say I existed in terms human as opposed to clinical and diseased. And newspapers really meant different things then, the language they used mattered, because from them our own language flowed (now the path is largely the reverse thanks to the Internet).

There were a lot of things about my childhood that were hard, and I don't tend to count being queer as one of them -- I was so weird that we didn't often get to that particular insult. It's not like I would have fit in and had friends and been easy in the world but for that.

But holy crap! Looking back and remembering all of this (God, we were so angry with the Times, with the Church, with Regan), I think, sure, of course I hated myself for other things -- because those things at least existed. How very strange.