From the Editor: The Pride 2008 Report

By the LNewsEditor

Every year, Pride festivals and parades get me to thinking about gay-ish things from a societal perspective. Stuff like "Do we still need Pride events?" or "In order to get acceptance (and legal equality) should we blend in or stand out?" But mostly, it's the little things that really matter, and fresh from the Pride festies in Seattle, these are my observations on...

Maximizing Your Pride Swag and Subsequent Fest:


Preparation is Everything: Folding camping chair that collapses into its own handy nylon tote bag, a backpack for the freebies you'll get, beverages and sustance. Pride festival food ain't cheap, so either eat lunch first or bring a sandwich. If you have a toddler, bring lots of handheld snackie things that'll keep them busy while they're oblivious to the parade. Goldfish crackers and string cheese are a sure bet.

Location, Location, Location: Gawd, I'll slap the next person who mentions real estate and this phrase in the same breath. But if you want to come home with a backpack full of free rubbers, queer biz phone books and beads you didn't necessarily have to flash your produce stand ("Fresh, ripe melons!") to get, you and your posse need to show up at least two hours early with folding chairs ready. Stake out turf near the middle of the parade route. Set up camp near the end, and most of the really cool freebies will already be gone. Plus, the drag queens may be wilted by the end of the parade, and there's no sadder spectacle than that. Also, put approximately 6-8 inches between each chair for later "skootching down, making room" for that friend of yours who pops out of the swarm and wants to join your parade party.

Dress Queer: Bust out that inappropriate, lesbocentric sloganed T-shirt you can't wear to work ("10,000 Battered Women a Year And All This Time I've Been Eating Mine Plain"), the rainbow beads, the practical dykey sandals and the baggy shorts. Last year, I worn a plain T-shirt, sneakers and the kind of khaki walking shorts favored by pudgy Midwestern moms. Grrl, I got no play at all in that drag. This year, I fagged it up with a rainbow kitty-emblazoned T-shirt tucked into faded, knee-length camo baggies with cargo pockets and a rainbow bead choker. Scored at least twice as many freebies from swag throwers who knew at a glance that I was, indeed "family" and not some damn tourist.

Be Friendly and Approachable: Make eye contact and smile purdy, Sugar! Shout "Hey, over here!" using your nice voice and wave your arms around just a bit, like you're having fun. Be coy, as if you won't die if they don't throw you anything cool, but it sure would make your day if they did. Being all serious, staring and giving off that blatantly "gimme gimme" vibe will get you nothing at all. Actually, that approach could probably work well for seeking singles in the bar next weekend...

Talk Nice to Everybody: Bizarre political pamphlets are some of the most amusing swag you can score, so don't rule them -- or the bearers of such propaganda -- out. Cute, quirky chicks with interesting hair/tattoos tend to pass out these invites to lectures by obscure organizations and all it take to meet them is saying "Hey, what have you got there?" while gesturing to their battered messenger bags. All it takes to send them away is, "Thanks for the info. I'll check it out!" Followed by that purdy smile again, of course, with the appropriate level of eye twinkle. Again, another helpful approach for picking up chicks later if you're single. Or for getting your ass kicked by your partner if you're not.


Establish a Post-Parade Rally Point: If there's a festival after the parade, stake out your gang's turf immediately with blankets, beach towels and/or chairs. Take turns holding the ground while the other team checks out the booths and chick singers. In the event of a really good concert, two scouts should go -- one to hold the prime real estate while the other returns to rally and relocate the team.

Enjoy The View: Even if that hot, little 20-something only needs an X of electrical tape to cover up her perky boobs, give her a smile even though she's too young for you. No, not the pervy leer. The "Happy Pride to you!" smile. Same goes for appreciating the rich, full-bodied laughter of a group of fat, sassy old women who are a of couple decades too old for you to date. Or that group of young, muscular twinks, bouncing around in wet underpants and feathered angel wings they built at their kitchen table.

Live in the Moment: For 364 days of the year, most of us blend quietly and neatly into society, just doing our jobs and living our sometimes boring lives. We pay rent, taxes, car payments and student loans. We worry about money issues, fret over relationships. We vote and volunteer.

But Pride Day is different. It's every queer person's day to be young, strong, joyful and beautiful. To stand out and be counted, quietly or not, because there are more of us than you think!

This is OUR day and we need to seize it -- along with all those cool beads and trinkets.

And Another Thing: Someone Save My Life Tonight

By Carole Taylor

In 1976, not even a decade after Stonewall, I was working as an administrator at a medical sciences university in Tennessee. I was out in the sense that I knew who I was, and in the sense that I was out to hundreds of other people in the gay community in Memphis. Memphis is still just a great big small town. You could only have two kinds of parties there and not become a social pariah: a small dinner party with no more than six people, or the whole gay side of town. If you had a big party, you had to invite everyone you knew, and that usually meant hundreds.

But I wasn’t out at work. And I wasn’t out to my family. I didn’t exactly lie about my life, but like every other lesbian I knew, I would find the tallest, best looking gay man I could grab hold of and drag his tight little buns to public social things for which I had to have a date. If they thought I was sleeping with him, then it was a fantasy for their own entertainment, which is usually the case when somebody thinks about anybody else’s sex life. It wasn’t a lie that I usually loved the guy I was with. It just didn’t go as far as the bedroom. This was known as having a cover.

We were like spies in the nest of the enemy.

Everything related to being gay was an inside joke to all of us. “Bar song, bar song,” we’d nudge each other knowingly when a disco tune would come on the radio. Straight people in Memphis didn’t know much about disco or that the music and driving beat had been playing in our own gay clubs for years. Gloria Gaynor did a tour of gay bars in the South that year because she knew where her audience and fame had come from. Bette Midler had just graduated from the Club Baths in New York with Barry Manilow as her pianist. Manilow had gone solo and played a Memphis midtown haunt almost weekly. Rumor had it that it was because he had a lover in town.

One of my covers was a medical student. A gay boy. A beautiful gay boy. Allan and I were like Will and Grace. Except Grace was gay, too. He and I did kareoke long before there was a word for it, and we’d party and dance ourselves stupid. We didn’t know the all words to the Elton John song, but we’d sing “Someone save my life tonight, Sugar Bear” because the syllables fit, and we’d laugh because everybody thought Allan was such a Sugar Bear. Are those the words? I still don’t know.

But nobody was out. Not in the sense that people are out now. No gay pride, no parades, no rainbow flags. But even now, the stages of coming out are pretty much the same. First you come out to yourself. Then to one other person, maybe a lover. Then the ripples in the puddle grow.

That year, the campus where I worked only had a student population of about 2,000. Small because it was a health sciences campus: medical students, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, allied health and graduate studies. And in that one year, our campus community had experienced four student suicides, and several more students had tried but had only gotten thrown out of school as a reward for their attempts. For their own good, so the professors would say. For our reputation, for the profession, is what they meant.

One of the students who killed himself was Allan.

At school, students who had emotional problems had a place to go for help. Nobody went, but they had an official place. Allan certainly never went. The student mental health office was part of the university’s psychiatry department. Not a situation likely to be seen as a welcoming place, certainly not for medical students, all of whom went through a required rotation in psychiatry and thus would have the psychiatrist as a professor. Students who sought counseling thought, and with some reason, that they’d be tossed out of school as being unstable. This was certainly not seen as a place where one could express concerns about such scary things as attractions or sex. The head of the psychiatry department that year sat in a meeting with me and at least four other gay people, all of us in hiding. It was just another campus committee, with random appointments. The fact that there were five of us who were gay, and that I knew were gay, had already blown the curve. A random group should only have had ten percent, according to all the studies I had read, but we were half. One of the most liberal of all the professors I knew, and I had worked with nearly all of them--the good doctor shrink said, with the five of us sitting there, “We don’t have any gay students here. And we don’t have any gay faculty or staff. It’s impossible. We would have picked that up on their entrance screening tests.”

So much for psychiatric perceptiveness and prescience.

Later that same year, the year that Allan died, I went to a professional conference and joined the gay caucus of that group. That year, my professional organization adopted overwhelmingly a resolution that gays and lesbians should not be discriminated against. My boss, to my shock, stood up and voted for the resolution. (He later fired a colleague of mine for being gay, but not by being honest about it, but rather using some trumped up excuse. The boss, poor dilbert, wasn’t known for consistency.)

At that same conference, I went to a presentation given by a gay man in his 60’s who had been out since before World War II. He lived in California, but still--it wasn’t all that safe to be out, even in California. The most important thing he said was that as gay people working with adult students, and as counseling professionals, we needed to come out. In whatever way, and to whomever we could, we needed to come out. To one other professional. Certainly to any student who came out to us. For our own mental health, for our own sanity, we needed to tell the truth.

So when I came home from the conference, I made an appointment with the head of student mental health and came out to her. I wanted to be a resource for her. I wanted her to call me if she had students who didn’t know how to cope with being gay in a profession who didn’t want them. I’d like to say that my coming out ended up saving some other beautiful gay boy’s life, but the psychiatrist never called me. I guess no one ever came to her with a coming out story. There is no heroic ending to this tale. I didn’t save anyone else’s life. Just mine.

I still think of Allan as a boy. He was only 24. I was only 29. When I close my eyes, he’s still young and beautiful. But the closet killed him. There wasn’t enough room in that little, dark space for a beautiful boy to breathe.

You never know. One truth about yourself could save a life. One truth can certainly save your own.



Carole Taylor holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called
"A Third Story". You can email her here.

The Amazon Trail: If I Can Dance, I Can March

By Lee Lynch

When Kiddo asked me to go to gay pride in our state capitol, I was all, no! I have to work on my book! I was worried, too, that my bad knee would give out on a long march. Then I remembered the Golden Crown Literary Society back in June, and how I danced for hours with anyone in sight, and lots with my sweetheart-to-be. I thought, if I can dance, I can march.

Kiddo is married to a man. She was planning to hang with her best woman friend at Pride Day, and her best friend’s husband and their daughters. This approach to a Pride celebration is not exactly in my copy of the Gay Agenda. We’re supposed to haul non-gays kicking and screaming to the recruiting booth for their indoctrinations, aren’t we? But Kiddo, the daughter of my late partner, honors me by calling me one of her moms, and seldom asks anything of me. I, in turn, never get to spend enough time with her. I decided to go.

As it turned out, there was no march. These days it seems that Pride can be an event rather than a jubilant parade or a defiant march. I hadn’t been to a Pride Celebration since the 1980s. In San Francisco I was an observer, not a participant. That march was all about partying, with a phalanx of dykes on bikes and floats filled with barely-clothed, body-painted and feathered men. Back in New York, in the 1970s, we were angry. We chanted slogans to the tops of the canyons of tall buildings and rejoiced at the feeling of righteous validation that came with the tons of ticker tape tossed down on us.

So there I was, at a state park, with one of my favorite people on earth, Kiddo, and a non-gay family I also hold dear, yet I was a stranger to every gay in sight. I introduced myself to representatives of Lavender Womyn, who didn’t know my name from a hole in the wall. Usually at least one member of such a group will ask if I hadn’t maybe written a book once upon a time. Not here. Kiddo and her friends were the ones who knew just about everyone. I accepted my new role and listened and shook hands and met more drag queens in one place than ever before in my life.

First, though, we were greeted by a little girl dressed in a white t-shirt, shorts and a huge grin. She’d been lost, the police called, and a small group of women and men were taking care of her. I was relieved that the police cars were not monitoring the behavior of the gay crowd. Nor did they have cause to be. Most of the guys could have been Elks or Lions or Odd Fellows at their annual picnics, if they have annual picnics. There was a large rhinestone crown being passed around, which coordinated not at all with the polo shirts and jeans that passed for drag that day.

This was a West Coast, laid-back celebration. There was a lot of karaoke on stage, a small, mixed gay chorus, and booths galore. Kiddo pointed out the booth of the local gay bar where she and hubby and their friends spend some of their evenings. I didn’t ask how that came to be a favorite watering hole, but I saw the genuine affection they had for their gay friends and that it was returned. Kiddo chose her companions well.

There, Kiddo gestured, was the woman, a handsome butch, who tried to pick her up last week. And over there was a young man who was extraordinarily beautiful as a woman, she said. Her friends’ youngest daughter, in her early teens, adored another of the queens and the two spent time with their arms around each other. We met all sorts of gay dogs, including Toby, a lively tan teacup poodle who rode in the basket of his adoring dyke owner’s motorized cart. There was a big emphasis on family and plenty of unselfconscious kids were in sight, gay kids among them. No church groups were protesting the gay presence in the park or the exposure of young children to gay women and men.

As a matter of fact, churches were represented in the vendor booths: M.C.C., of course, and Quakers and others. There was a bank recruiting staff. Two local car dealerships were displaying their wares. T-shirts were for sale and rainbow paraphernalia, and the sno-cone booth had been thoroughly inspected by the health department. There would be no sno-cone sickened queers at this event.

Which was a quietly proud event, compared to Gay Pride days of yore. It really was about pride, not anger; family, not cruising; love and inclusion, not rejection of the dominant society. The lost little girl who greeted us had found safety in a family of gays and it looked, on this glorious summer day in this state capitol, like gay people had found some safety for ourselves.

Copyright 2007 Lee Lynch

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here .