26 June 2000
This past weekend was the Twin Cities GLBT Pride 2000 festival, and the second year of my participation in it. In retrospect, my involvement in "the community" (and, by extension, the festival) has grown quite dramatically over the past year. Last year I only showed up for one day of Pride, and my engagement with that was limited to meandering along the paths in Loring Park with various groups of friends for a few hours. I missed marching in the parade with the Macalester group because, silly me, I hadn't taken off of work.
This year was a whole new story: I was on the bus to Loring by 9:30 Saturday morning because I had promised the Macalester alumni director that I'd hang out/volunteer at the Mac/Carleton/Grinnell/etc. booth for a few hours. I returned home fairly early, as the banners Queer Union usually carries in the parade have gone missing and it was my job to coordinate the making of a substitute before Sunday's parade.
I had coerced J. into helping me, but since she's the art major around here, it turned into more of a benefactor/artist arrangement: I paid for the sheet, she magically turned it into a banner. For the parade, we draped it over two mop handles taped together. Verrrry classy. Our whole entourage had a kind of low-budget hometown feel to it, especially considering that we followed Boom, a schmantzy gay bar, in the parade line up. They had a flatbed, semi-naked men wearing angel wings, and an overwhelming sound system. We had a bedsheet and fifteen college kids. Our spontaneous motto was, "we're small, we're here, and some of us are queer."
The parade itself was Sunday morning, and so I was up early once again. In case anyone had any doubt, Coke at 9 am is not at all comparable to coffee in taste or effectiveness. Despite having to stand around for a good hour and a half before getting going, the parade was a lot of fun. All along the route, we got cheers and yells from Mac students and grads. "Whoo-hoo, Macalester! Class of '71!" After awhile, we just started whooping at anyone who whooped at us. People in the parade would run into the crowd of onlookers to greet a friend, and spectators would run out into the parade to march with people they knew. It was all a giddy kind of chaos.
I even had a surprise person run out and walk with me for a bit-- one of my friends on the program in Amsterdam, Beth, was dating a girl named Meghan while we were in Europe. Meghan wasn't on our program, but by happy chance her program happened to be in the same place as ours a lot of the time. She didn't like her group much, so we kind of adopted her into ours. Anyway, Meghan goes to the University of Minnesota, and she gave me her phone number before we all went home so that the two of us could keep in touch. I was a big putz and for some reason never called, but now I fully intend to.
I was bushed after the parade, so I went home to crash for awhile. Later in the afternoon, J. and Emre and I went back to Loring, but it was warm, muddy, humid and crowded, so after an hour of listless wandering, we went home again.
Pride weekend was fun, but I have to not think about it too much or it rapidly becomes unfun. The idea that GLBTQ people comprise some sort of happy cohesive family is hopeful at best, and I don't quite know what to think of the evident commercialism-- Target Corp., for example, had a whole goddamned pavilion. On the other hand, it is just about the only time and place in the Cities where expressing queer gender or sexuality is the rule rather than the exception, and there's definitely something to be said for that. As my co-worker Carrie said this morning, "after awhile, it's just like 'oh, another man in a dress. Whatever.'"