Straddling the line between old school showbiz cheesiness and contemporary short attention span whateverness, Ben is the New Old Gay. He loves Patti LuPone.

I’m thinking back on my first Pride Parade. I would love to say “Pride March,” but as I reflect upon my annual bacchanalian celebrations of gay liberation, “parade” is a much better word for whatever it is, exactly, I’ve been doing the last Sunday of the last 14 Junes.

In San Francisco in 1996 (the end of my sophomore year at Berkeley), I spent my very first Pride with close friends, a pair of gay twins. They came to my apartment the night before to prep me (being from San Francisco, they had been attending Pride since High School). We spent the night on my terrace, in drag, singing and dancing along with Diana Ross & The Supremes as well as the black girls from Little Shop of Horrors, to the horror of the homeless people walking around Berkeley at 3 AM. Screw ‘em. We were having a blast, and we were proud.

The next morning, hungover from cheap wine, the three of us struggled into the outfits we’d carefully selected the night before, and together straggled into the City. I’ll never forget my first sight of miles of marchers extending down Market Street, from the Embarcadero all the way to the Castro. To me, in San Francisco, Gay Pride felt like a national holiday.

Just as I was beginning to take in the enormity of SF Pride ‘96, we were offered “Parade Brownies” – $10 each and wrapped in rainbow plastic wrap. We were young, but not stupid, and thrilled to further amp up the day. The pot took a while to hit us, but it was worth the wait, when as our sensory experience peaked, cabaret singer Sharon McNight’s float rose up over a hill, eliciting cheers and tears as she vociferously belted out her version of “Over The Rainbow” on a loop.

As a budding New Old Gay, I was delighted with this change in soundtrack from the club hits of 1996 (“And I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain. And I miss you . . . ”). My sense of belonging to this group of people, of this being my Pride, was overwhelming.

I happened to be home in L.A. for Pride 1997, and what my reverie lacked in San Francisco magic, I made up for with substance ingestion. The day started out with me taking a gay friend from college to shroom with straight friends from (straight) High School. Showing up unapologetically in some ridiculous electric blue synthetic fibers, promptly announcing we had to run off to West Hollywood for Gay Pride, and yet, being met with such acceptance, admiration even, by these people, from whom I had felt so alienated growing up gay, was exhilarating. I was Proud!

The wild night that followed, snorting up every amphetamine and horse tranquilizer on Santa Monica Boulevard (and tearfully confessing my undying love to a total stranger), however, left me burnt out cracking “Gay Shame” jokes.