In the name of love

The streets of Philadelphia

It’s June, and for LGBTQ people and a whole lot of others that means Pride, as it has for decades. I remember it from my young days, though I don’t think I knew what it was called then. The gay parade, I think they told me.

I kind of happened on it with friends in the West Village. It felt informal if not spontaneous, but boisterous; young men, mostly, went down Christopher Street in a slow flood, but it didn’t have the feeling you’d expect from hundreds of young men filling a city street — by which I mean, there was no sense of danger or malice or if-our-team-loses-we’ll-burn-a-car. You could see and hear and feel in the raised voices joy and, if your dial could tune in to it, something like relief, a feeling that they had made it through to the promised land.

I remember a drag queen doing Marilyn and blowing kisses from the back of a convertible to cheers. I don’t recall any other display or defined group in that march, if you could call it that. But as the plague years came and the guys on Christopher Street and everyone else in the community had to pull it together to survive, the March took on a feeling that was still fun but also militant — like the gay version of a small-town Fourth of July parade, but in wartime, with the homefront behind and the task ahead. In those years I went up Fifth Avenue to see it, Dykes on Bikes revving their power growl in front. If I stood by St. Patrick’s and heard each wave of marchers crying SHAME! SHAME! as they passed, I also felt something like that growl.

But mainly I felt love girded with determination. Everyone came to Pride. New Yorkers are not sentimental in the usual sense, but they know by instinct what it is to be outcast, because the nation at large never stops saying (except for the odd, brief 9/11) that it considers New Yorkers communists, unclean, illegal, and, back in those days, a Bunch of Queers. (The New York Post, reaction’s emissary to the local press, had an editorial cartoonist who dropped gay characters into his panel whenever the subject came up as literally limp-wristed men making kissy-faces.)

In return, New Yorkers said good riddance and made their own, better world with all the other outcasts, and were proud of Pride.

Pride got around, to every city and many small towns. A lot of people hated it and wanted to kill it. From our New York redoubt we heard their seething and saw the spectacle of their fury on TV. But we also heard of and got cards and visits from people in Texas, in Kansas, in Alabama and elsewhere, coming out, taking stages in drag, getting their city fathers on board and having their own parades. Tourists came to Pride. The country still didn’t like New Yorkers or city folk in general, but that top-note of gay-hate seemed to be missing or at least muted.

Then came the marriage equality movement, and then Obergefell, and it could feel like, except for weird little hinterland pockets, all that was laid to rest.

Well.

Things have gotten like they got. For years now the MAGA creeps have been beating up on trans people. If you have any perspective at all it looks like a rear-guard action against the rest of the rainbow as well. The administration has been busy throwing LGBTQ books out of any library it can muscle, and just marked Pride by stripping the name of Harvey Milk from a Navy ship. (They plan to do the same with ships named for women and black people, too, but it’s notable that they started there.) And then you open the Washington (nee Moonie) Times and see something like this:

The ‘gospel of pride’ Is not the Gospel of Christ

It’s June, and it’s that wonderful time of year when liberal pastors and priests across the country take to their pulpits to declare that conservative Christians, whether they be Catholic or charismatic, are bigots if we still believe that men engaging in sodomy are depraved or that women having sex with women are wrong. Yes, for the entire month, we will be harangued with messages from the church itself extolling the wonders of “same-sex love” and the virtues of 57 genders...

It goes on like that, and you think, like in the old Chris Rock joke: Damn – they still make you? It’s the same sort of thing that (as I have long chronicled) bigots barfed for years, but which had been mostly missing from the mainstream conservative press. But it’s creeping back. Buoyed by the Trump power grab, these guys are dreaming big. They plan to brute force it, feeding lawsuits up the chain to their SCOTUS and overturning all the civil rights decisions they blame for turning their country into a place where people who are not like themselves can thrive and be happy.

As often these days, the prospect invites despair. But last weekend I visited Philadelphia and took in their Pride event. And it lifted me. The parade was huge but, by New York and D.C. standards, somewhat ramshackle, though admirably self-policed, and street-level — sort of like the Baltimore Pride I first experienced last year, except bigger and — this happily surprised me — with even less corporate presence.

Maybe that’s going to be general this year as big brands, intimidated by Tubby, punk out. But Philly Pride didn’t suffer from the lack. In fact it was nice to see instead more banners like GOD LOVES YOU, NO EXCEPTIONS (the Episcopal Church), TRUMP IS A SYMPTOM/CAPITALISM IS A DISEASE (Socialist Alternatives), FURRYDELPHIA, and, scrawled on cardboard with a red ballpoint pen,

If You

Don’t Give Us

Queer Liberation

we’ll

Take It!

It was good, too, to see the baby gays and trans kids sitting on curbs with each other, drinking out of plastic cups, or at Philly AIDS Thrift trying on used stripper heels. I saw in them, not joy exactly (though there was plenty of joy, particular when the DJ caught fire), but something beyond even the relief I saw on Christopher Street in the 70s — just comfort, being at home in their own skin in a way I don’t know that most people are. Are they oblivious to the hate that’s straining at the gates of institutional toleration to get at them? Or do they believe, have they been told, whether by the example of history or the confidence of youth, that whatever the assholes do, the battle is already won?