I love a parade

I don't really but I'll make an exception for Pride

I’m sentimental about Pride. I was raised homophobic and that took me a while to get over. A little education and exposure will divest most of us of our grosser bigotries, but some poison can last a while in the blood.

While being confronted with the absurdity of my prejudices was dramatic and effective, it wasn’t a complete education. In fact, living in New York in the 70s and seeing gayness only partially submerged by fear and convention gave me the impression that, as with a lot of the silent, illicit bargains of big city life, it could and would go on like that: nodded and winked at, laughed about, in the most clinical sense tolerated.

The AIDS crisis taught me more — what a horrible way to think of it, but it’s true: When a disease to which everyone is vulnerable but with which one community is especially afflicted, and the wider culture, from the President on down, is willing to abandon them to death, it has a powerful effect on the survivors. (If you’re very young think of it like Gaza.) It braced up what I knew rationally with outrage: To deny the full humanity of gay people was not only absurd but also unjust. And I knew for a positive fact that it was a threat to everyone else as well.

Like I said, it’s terrible to treat a plague like a lesson, but it did make gay life visible beyond the demimonde and the necessity of equal rights more obvious. The Pride marches — which I had previously experienced as Christopher Street parties that just got super boisterous in the summer — became a real show of solidarity and force: Still fun, still with laughter, but with a lot less nodding and winking. Everything was out in the open. It had to be.

Like everything alive and healthy, this has evolved; the name Gay Men’s Health Crisis is now, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, sufficiently retrograde to be confined to an acronym. Meanwhile the big acronym, LGBTQ, keeps taking on new letters as needed. (The United States Department of Health and Human Services adds “I+” for intersex and others.)

People who labor over getting every single board member’s table card exactly right make jokes about this. But it shows both a charming sensitivity to the needs of others and an admirably expansive view of desire and identity. Generations have grown up on this continuum, barely knowing the old segregationist ideas of sexuality and genders.

But some of them are now confronted with reaction from the people who never got with any of this and want to erase all the civil rights advances of the past century. Like a lot of things that once seemed settled at a very high level, suddenly the idea that people can be and live as themselves without being declared illegitimate and declassed is up for grabs again, and it seems as if the matter will be returned to the streets.

However, something I find encouraging — even beyond the usual arc-of-history stuff — is that while, for example, you can find among black people any number of shitheels who will happily step up to tell you, as MAGA Rep. Byron Donalds has, that black folks like him were better off in the days of Jim Crow than now, it is very hard to find anyone in the LGBTQ community (excluding nuts like Caitlyn Jenner) who would ever try that shit.

Not that the Pride march and related events I saw in Baltimore last weekend were in any way martial or confrontational. In fact that was the beauty of them. This was the first Pride I have attended outside of the big media foci of New York and Washington, and it had much of the cruddy charm for which Baltimore is famous. (The most congested part of the march was outside a Safeway. This is my Safeway, and I can tell you it is not an exalted example of the species — though they generously provided porta-potties for march attendees and even had a bumping in-store DJ.)

So the crowd was not NY/DC slick. I don’t think many of them were scouting post-Pride brunch. People who wanted to be fabulous, whatever their budget, did so; others just picked up the beads and bangles and gee-gaws that were handed out or brought their own small signifiers of fabulosity, their multicolored hair, their tats, their cheeky t-shirt or vintage dressage. They have been living in this world and as far as they’re concerned this battle is already won.

Another bright sign: All the couples of every sort that came out, some with children (like a tyke I saw all in tie-dye with a “Protect Trans Kids” shirt). I could not know whether all or most of them would be comfortable at every event or locale (maybe not in Curtis Bay — but then again, maybe so!). But they were certainly comfortable here and happy. It’s unimaginable that any non-diseased person who saw this would ever want it otherwise. And part of what Pride can and must accomplish is to keep it that way.