You couldn’t have paid me to spend Pride 1998 anywhere but San Francisco, and my beautiful City by the Bay did not disappoint. At the time, I was directing a production of Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey in the Castro, so the marketing opportunity of the Parade was a no-brainer. In order to be permitted to march last minute, we had to coordinate our appearance with a U.C. Berkeley campus activist group, and I wound up dating one its leaders for my remaining months in the Bay Area. I’ll always feel romantically nostalgic when I remember how beautiful he looked marching that day, wearing yellow barrettes to match his organization’s yellow t-shirt. The confluence of activism and sexuality and gender play was liberating and empowering and hot.
Once I moved to New York, I began hosting an annual Pride brunch for my friends and their friends to kick off the day in style and steak and eggs. The brunch would always begin with us, exfoliated, moisturized and dolled up in our chicest breathable fabrics (Pride is to New Old Gays as Easter is to little Christian girls?), throwing back Bloody Marys and Mimosas and making decreasingly coherent declarations of our friendship and unity. One thought I regularly recycled in my toasts was the idea that our generation is known for its disaffectedness and our community for its lack of leadership, but that when I looked around at the people close to me, I saw the most brilliant, passionate, committed and caring minds and hearts and souls, and how proud I was to know them and know that our future is in our hands. That always played like gangbusters!
Each year, high on hooch and ourselves, we would promenade down Fifth Avenue, stopping here and there for fifteen or fifty minutes to enjoy the parade of hot guys and that triumphant energy unique to the crowds at any Pride, as well as the actual Parade/March itself. The question was always what to do next. We would pool together as many house party invitations as we could for more boozing and cruising and ultimately, the night would wind down as we made our separate ways home or to the bars, always eschewing the Dance on the Pier, as we are not circuit boys.
July 2nd, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Of all the “Don’t Rain on My Parade” clips, why that one?
I’m sorry. Was I supposed to say something more significant?
July 2nd, 2009 at 6:47 pm
i love that you picked this one! if for nothing else than the long blonde hair!
July 2nd, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Thanks, Nat!
My reasons for choosing this Don’t Rain On My Parade were:
1.) She looks pretty, kind of like a number of my friends’ moms when I was little.
2.) It’s not the tugboat movie version all the New Old Gays already know, frame by frame, by heart.
3.) Its somewhat cheesy 70s variety show aesthetic which I adore and one which Babs has really steered clear of for decades.