It's Saturday, and my wife, the public school teacher, had a ton of grading to do before the end of the school year. So my daughter and I went out with our next-door neighbor and her daughter. My kid is four, her friend is eight. We rode the subway into town, planning to pass some time in the Boston Public Garden — run around on the grass, watch the ducks, ride the swan boats, kill some time on a sunny afternoon.
When we came up to street level from the subway, we heard a Mighty Noise, and to our astonishment and delight, there was line of colorfully dressed people marching down the street! It was the Boston Pride Parade, and the four of us stopped at the curb and enjoyed the display. There were gay-straight alliances from schools all over New England; there were gay-straight groups from area businesses; there were groups of gay veterans; there were groups of transgender folk...there was a whole phalanx of utterly fabulous drag queens and a float with about ten svelte, muscular, nearly nude men from Provincetown gyrating to earsplitting disco music. There was a contingent of moms, dads, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins from PFLAG, and a gay community marching band.
There were clowns and balloons and loud noises and silly costumes, and we stood at the curb and watched the stream of people go by, waving and clapping. It was lovely, and my daughter was blissfully happy.
I thought of being in high school in the early 1970s, when anybody who was a little bit different was a "faggot," and was punched, kicked, spat on. There was no such thing as a gay-straight alliance when I was in school. I thought of the many friends I had from school who've come out.
I thought of my friend Jim, who came out in his last year of high school, a year after I'd graduated. We knew one another through music, and because he worked on the high school newspaper when I was the editor. He died about a decade later, the first person I knew personally to fall victim to HIV/AIDS.
I thought of my friend Chris, who was an openly gay high school student in a neighboring town. He had mastered the art of the witty retort. When the "jocks" yelled, "hey, faggot!" when he walked down the halls, he'd turn around, strike a pose, and reply, "that's Mister Faggot to you!" He was one of the finest musicians I'd ever known; a superb songwriter and a charismatic performer. He died too, in an automobile accident in 1982.
While I stood there on the curb watching the parade, I had another parade in my head. I thought of old friends, students, roommates, relatives, teachers. Some are still alive; some have gone. Some are living happily; others are coping with sadness and loss. I thought of the two lesbian couples whose kids are my daughter's playmates. I remembered the complicated trajectories of friends whose sexualities have shifted over the years: the old lover who lived in a lesbian relationship for a decade, then fell in love with a man — their daughter is now six, if I recall correctly. He's been asking her to marry him for years, and she's been refusing, because their home state didn't allow gay couples to marry, and she wouldn't tie the knot with him until it was possible for every loving couple. And I thought with pleasure of some recent news, and I wondered if I'd be receiving an invitation from them any time soon.
I saw an elderly Korean War vet with a huge smile, waving a rainbow flag and holding a sign that said, "Ask Me and I'll Tell You!", and I remembered one of my favorite quotes:
"I think every Negro over fifty should get a medal for putting up with all that crap."
-- Miles Davis
It struck me that the point of the Pride Festival and the Pride Parade wasn't just for GLBT people to be proud of themselves. Feeling proud of yourself is harder when you're part of a stigmatized minority, to be sure...but it's part of being a complete human, no matter what your specifics are. That parade did something else, too: it gave us straight folk an opportunity to say how Proud we were, of the members of our human family who have had to put up with so much crap over the years, simply for being who they were. Those of us who haven't had to put up with so much crap can only make analogies, and analogies can only go so far in helping you understand something you've never experienced.
My daughter is four. She was born in a state where it was possible for same-sex couples to marry; she has never known any other possibility. It is my fervent hope that by the time she grows to be a woman the whole notion of discrimination based on sexual orientation is as irrelevant and antiquated as Phlogiston, the Luminiferous Aether, or the Divine Right of Kings.
"Daddy," she said, "I want to be in the parade!"
"Yeah, sweetheart," I replied. "Everybody loves a parade."