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At my first Pride march I was a spectator, sitting on a curb in West Hollywood watching the parade pass me by. I was an emotional jumble of confusion and embarrassment, and I was not at all sure I was in the right place. It was 1993 — hardly the bad old days, but not exactly a gay paradise either. Even Ellen was not out yet.
At the time I worked for one of the biggest companies in southern California, but it had only just, reluctantly, allowed an LGBT employee group to form. The company-paid real estate agent charged with helping me relocate from New York had done her best to steer me away from West Hollywood, with many a veiled reference to how I might not like “the denizens” of that city. The company had many, many gay employees, but there was no official contingent at the march that year. The times were definitely changing, but they sure hadn’t turned the corner yet.
Today I walked down Fifth Avenue in New York with my family, one of more than 30,000 marchers who turned out for this year’s Pride. We walked behind the banner of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, one of the largest employers in New York, and a team handed out t-shirts, flags, bubbles, pom-poms, sunscreen, snacks, water…. There was little doubt that this LGBT employee group had the full support of management. Yes, times have changed.
Still, there’s a reason I was there this year. I haven’t been to a Pride event in ages, certainly not since the kids came along. I’d become complacent — we are totally out, everywhere, to everyone, and although there are still some minor awkward moments and even a few hurtful rejections, for the most part we are no big deal. The last decade’s worth of advances have made so much difference in our everyday lives that it can be easy to forget just how fragile our rights can be.
Last year at this time we were celebrating that most wonderful, amazing Supreme Court decision establishing marriage equality. I raised a glass or two myself in celebration, but in the back of my mind I was worried about the inevitable backlash. Those worries were well founded, as the last 12 months have brought us a dispiriting array of “religious freedom” bills, “bathroom bills,” more hate crimes against LGBT people, and, finally, Orlando.
I have no illusion that my marching down Fifth Avenue will put even the tiniest dent in any of that. But this year, as never before, I was compelled to bring my family out into the vast sea of rainbow flags to show the world that we are here. We are here in all of the 400+ groups that marched today — so many that it took more than four hours just to get us all to the starting point. On the block where we waited there were hundreds of LGBT individuals and allies — with Macy’s and Microsoft just ahead of us and Nordstrom and Northwell Health right behind. (Of course, had we known the lineup was alphabetical, we might have walked with our friends at the Ackerman Family Institute instead.) We are everywhere.
Just as the St. Patrick’s Day Parade is a way not just to celebrate, but to show the world that the Irish are everywhere, so is Pride a way to show that we, too, are everywhere. Yes, the nightly news will zoom in on Dykes on Bikes and the drag queens, but most of us today were in shorts and t-shirts — just the regular old people in your neighborhood, who just so happen to be LGBT.
Granted, our kids were exposed to more skin than they usually are, but they were mostly impressed with how casual it all was. (“Mom, really, there’s no dress code today? Not at all?”) Their main fashion takeaway seemed to be that if you’re going to wear a thong in public, it’s better to have a tight butt than a saggy one. I can’t say I disagree.
An awful lot has changed in the 20 years since I sat on that California curb, almost all of it for the better. I’m a different person now, and the world is a different place. For a while today I was thinking that the single biggest change was that you could actually get two middle-schoolers to walk in a gay event at all (even if the younger of the two did pronounce it “the weirdest experience of my life” — to which I could only reply "yet").
In the end, however, I concluded that the biggest change of all, for me, was that today I was sure I was in the right place.
