PeaceBang

Boston Pride: We’re Here, We’re Queer, I Think We’re Maybe Getting Used To It

I am becoming my mother.

Let me explain.

Shirley is notorious for getting wickedly lost on even the simplest outings, causing much ire and ridicule from her three obnoxious kinder. I think it’s high time I stopped teasing her, because I’m starting to get lost all the time myself.

Yesterday, for the umpteenth time, I phoned the director of my music ensemble to check in before a “gig” and learned that I was in the wrong part of town and at the wrong church. Oh, organized, together, moi!! Exhausted from teaching my intensive course all week and attending a special end of year board meeting the night before, I dragged myself out of bed at 6:30 AM and primped for our 9:00 AM concert at (I thought) a Methodist church in the vicinity of Old South Church in downtown Boston.

Dumkopf. I don’t know what planet I was on when I read the e-mail explaining the day’s details, but let’s just say that the church was nowhere NEAR downtown. At least I got the hour wrong, too — and had enough time to hail a cab (leaving my car in a garage near the original, wrong site) and get to the Union United Methodist Church in plenty of time.

The worship service was terrific. The Rev. Troy Perry, founded of MCC, preached and I fell asleep to the lull of his voice — he just spoke way too fast for me to understand and keep up with. Before I fell asleep (sitting up like a horse), he sure did get in some good licks. I’m sorry I missed the rest.

There was lots of beautiful music by groups like Coro Allegro and Voices Rising and the Men’s Choir of the Union United Methodist Church. There were Episcopalian and Jewish and MCC and UCC and all kinds of faith traditions represented — all except Unitarian Universalists, who were having their own service over at Arlington Street Church. This made me sad.

After the service, I had to take another cab back to my car (we were not anywhere near public transit, and I was trying to beat the big parade and get out of Dodge), and that turned out to be kind of a wash on the practical level but really glorious on the human interaction level, because I had an amazing Haitian driver who asked me what was causing all the traffic back-ups, and I told him, and we had an amazing conversation about gay issues and sexuality and the church. I was wearing my collar, so he knew I was a pastor.

As we drove around in circles and running into parade barrier after barrier, this beautiful man who kept referring to me as “honey” and “sweetheart” told me the story of his own father, a Protestant pastor in Haiti. His father used to go to small villages– where he would be warmly welcomed as a representative of the Church — and find a particularly attractive young girl whom he would select to take with him to Port Au Prince for (so he claimed) an education and further opportunities. The people of the village, so vulnerable and so certain of the pastor’s benevolence, would enthusiastically send their daughters off with him. He would then keep the girl as a sexual captive until he tired of her or she got pregnant, and then abandon her in the city. It seems that the pastor’s evil scheme was discovered when one of his victims drowned her child in desperation.

“The church is an assembly of sick people,” the cab driver said. He said he hasn’t been in a church since he learned about his father. And just tonight at a party, a 60+ year old woman I’ve known for years described over beers that she found out in her adulthood that she was the illegitimate daughter of a Catholic priest who, when he tried to run off with her mother, was persuaded by the Jesuits to abandon her and come back to the Church.

When I got out of that cab, exchanging hugs and a kiss with the driver, I knew I couldn’t just leave the city. So I stood on the Beacon Street across from the UUA headquarters with two adorable engaged women from New Hampshire to watch the whole marvelous spectacle of gay, straight, black, white, Latino, male, female, transgendered, transsexual, bisexual, Out, Queer humanity parade by.

One young man pranced over to me and put a strand of gaudy beads around my neck, saying, “HERE you go, Father!”
Another lei’d me with a rainbow wreath, saying, “Here you go, VICAH!”
A group of men in soccer shorts trying to do some kind of stunt involving a kind of tricky cheerleader move messed up and blamed me, claiming that I made them nervous. We pointed at each other and laughed and yelled in mock accusation.
A cute young man zipped around distributing condoms and quite pointedly passed me by. “HEY!” I yelled. “Religious people aren’t allowed to be sexual???” He ran back to me without missing a beat and pressed three packages of condoms into my hands, grinning and holding his hand over his mouth in the classic “oops!” position. I accepted them in the spirit of hope that never dies, and a lot of laughter.

Please don’t tell me I’m perpetuating stereotypes by using words like “pranced.” Have you ever been to Pride? There’s a WHOLE lotta prancing and dancing, preening, strutting, vamping and shaking of booties going on. There were “Dykes on Bikes” and drag queens in feathered showgirl costumes, and PFLAG groups of proud parents and an old, eccentric woman carrying a sign that said, “My daughter is bisexual, so I’m TWICE as proud!”

One man held a sign that said, “I’m proud of my heterosexual parents!”

There were Montessori schools and local elementary schools marching behind banners, which reduced me to a mess of tears. The woman I was standing next to asked nicely, “Is this your first Pride?” “Nnnno,” I blubbered, “I just don’t remember seeing any school groups befo-(sob)-o-o-re!!”

Our governor, Deval Patrick, marched by and I cheered for him until I was hoarse. If you didn’t know, he has been working overtime to make sure that an anti-gay constitutional amendment isn’t made possible by a ballot initiative that our legislature is scheduled to vote on this coming Thursday. I love this man.

Unitarian Universalists were out in force, marching behind congregational banners and looking old and almost entirely very white and slightly tired. I was so proud to see the many banners, but wondered: where were our younger church members? We can’t expect the same people who marched for Civil Rights in the 50’s and 60’s to be the only ones carrying our banners today. I assume that some of the younger UUs were marching with other organizations. I hope so.

I saw tons of people that I know: my local Methodist colleague, an Episcopal priest buddy who popped in out of the crowd and threw herself into my arms, locking her legs around my waist and scaring the wits out of me. Stephanie, I’m sending you my chiropractor’s bill, you maniac! I saw ANTS seminarians (and laid stealth smooches on some of them), and other UU colleagues and various friends from various organizations and activist groups I’ve worked with over the years, and it was very moving to be there. I saw an old pagan acquaintance marching with the Queer Pagans. I met her about 12 years ago when she was just becoming “she” and had been thrown out of her house by her parents and was living with transsexual Wiccan friends of mine at their place in Somerville. Seeing her marching along looking healthy and safe and happy was amazing. I yelled her name but she didn’t hear me.

And when the two smiling men rode by in a convertible draped in a “JUST MARRIED” banner, I had to grab my soaked hankie again.

After the last float had gone by, I went to have some lunch at a pizza joint in the heart of downtown. When I walked in draped in beads and Pride stickers and a rainbow lei, still wearing my clerical collar, a group of five police officers sharing a pizza gave me a direct stare that bordered on the hostile. As I walked by them to order my sausage sub (no remarks, please — I know), I said in a totally casual tone, “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.”

They sure did get interested in that pizza real fast.

P.S. A PeaceBang Kiss of Peace to Rev. Martin D. McLee of Union United Methodist Church.