PeaceBang

Pride Theme: “Ask. Tell. Proud To Serve…”

I should add that the Pride Theme in Boston this year was controversial, because some saw it as a pro-military statement. As you can see from the website, it was not intended to be specifically about being out in the military but about g/l/b/t folk being out and integral in all walks of life. One woman was carrying a big sign that said, “Are you SURE your librarian is straight?” I thought that was great.

Still, I know of at least three people who stayed away out of protest, one grumbling that promoting “queer cannon fodder” was not his idea of Pride.

Please tell me I’m wrong about this, but I scanned the Boston Globe yesterday and didn’t see ONE WORD about Pride. I mean, heck, it was only attended by maybe tens of thousands of people, closing down downtown Boston for hours!! THAT’s not news!

And I must respectfully disagree with my dear friend Scott Wells about the “tacky” floats. I hope that Pride never becomes too staid and respectable. I hope it always maintains an element of heinie-shaking, outrageous, drag-queen striding, beads-throwing, raucous FABULOUSNESS. To me, the g/l/b/t community is our uptight, pornography-addicted, repressed, homophobic, misogynist society’s reminder that we are messy, flesh and blood BODIES. We are wild sexual beings who do not belong in categories and boxes, but in relationships and joyous, unapologetic incarnation of Who We Are!

Listen up: when I was a little girl and my parents were in the throes of an emotionally violent and miserable marriage, and my mother very much under the influence of some drug or another (mostly booze), my dad was an edgy workaholic maniac and my sister and brother and I were scared little ghosts in our house, do you know who it was that raised me? Inspired, inspiring, grounded, talented, loving, committed theatre and music homos who were there, day after day, providing a thrilling vision that I wanted to be part of, and who had the discipline, adult maturity and sense of responsibility that my OWN PARENTS LACKED. When my own parents were too unhealthy to show up for me, my music teachers were there EVERY day, sober, exacting and ready to work. My theatre director(s) was there EVERY night in the summer, guiding the cast and crew through weeks and weeks of rehearsals and into a triumphant opening night, giving us and the community the gift of fantastic theatre.

Yes, the gay boys in the theatre were flamboyant and yes, they were promiscuous — now that I think about it, why wouldn’t they be? Wouldn’t we ALL be, if society told us we were freaks and perverts and should never be LEGALLY or religiously allowed to marry and make a lifetime commitment? Think that little fact of broad societal disapproval might have anything to do with that? Dammit to hell!?

I hope the g/l/b/t community never, ever buttons up too much. When I see them out and out there — spiky-haired, bare-breasted women with fierce faces, gangly teens girls holding hands, boys in Speedos and Carmen Miranda headdresses doing the merengue on top a gaudy float, tranny babes teetering by on 6″ platforms, everything inside me hollers, “YES! YES! YES! TELL it! Bring it ON! Remind us all WHO WE ARE!”

My own two gay fathers, both serious classical musicians and life-long schoolteachers, would tsk at all the nonsense, but … the thing is, they’re just not as queer as I am.