Pride

I experience annual Gay Pride festivals as a gay man of sixty-two. I visualize myself as a bedraggled veteran, like a familiar specter at any November 11th parade, my body shifting and shrinking within my gay uniform of shorts and T-shirt. While I look own with some reserve, the exuberance of youth amuses me. Memory brings me back there with editing.

The adolescents fascinate me. They are two generations away from our struggle. We worried about them back then. We didn't want them to be tortured as we had been. Do they get it? Does it matter? We succeeded for them, whether they get it or not. That is our reward. They must find their own.

Tolerating the occasional stare which says, "What are you doing here, old man?", is easy. It beats being invisible and discarded, like so many of my gay forebears. Peter and I walk along together. Our nine years have been punctuated by these parades. He snaps scores of pictures. I wield the small video cam. It is a ritual of sorts. A creative one.

Celebrating hard-won victories year after year reduces them to enshrined history. Static and done. Gay activism is not a done deal in a world (Iran) where gay men are still hung in public squares in the name of religion. It is not a done deal in a world (Uganda) where gay people with HIV are threatened with execution. It is not a done deal in a world (U.S.and other nations) where same-sex partners are second-class citizens.

Let the marching and dancing begin. We have always been able to celebrate our forbidden passions with stolen joy, but now we must do it in public streets every year to make our point. We are loving human beings, to be respected as equals and not to be feared.