Reflections on my 20th Pride festival

It’s kind of amazing for me to think about but this is my 19th Pride parade. Since 1989 I have always gone to Pride whether I was living in San Francisco (where I went to my first 12 Pride celebrations) or Portland, where I’ve done the last nine. At any rate, I am now sitting at Tom McCall Waterfront Park waiting for the Parade to start. This is one of only five where I have been purely a spectator. No drum, no marching with some non-profit or volunteer group or another. Some of that is that I think I’ve become somewhat jaded. It’s just another Pride festival. For Jaime, however, it’s all still new and fresh and exciting as this is only her second Pride and so she still has the excitement, the sense that it’s all new. We’re waiting for the roar and shaking of Dykes on Bikes, which last year in San Francisco, was renamed to the “Women’s Motorcycle Contingent” for reasons that still mystify me. It’s Dykes on Bikes, such as it always has been and, in my mind, such as it always will be.

Yesterday, I spent a good portion of the day at the Festival. I was on the setup crew for my Toastmaster’s club and, of course, had to wander the Festival for a while collecting my yearly queer SWAG. This year the pickings were kind of slim, but again, I’m a jaded old dyke these days and while I’m happy to be here with my wife if I had it to decide, I would have stayed at home and maybe done some writing. The parade should be here relatively soon now.

I’ve run into a few people this weekend, including someone from the old Lake Merritt Breakfast Club. She mentioned how good I look with some weight on me, reminding me of how skinny I once was.

Over the years, Pride has changed. There are a lot more families here. It used to be that kids were a relatively rare sight at Pride. We are surrounded by a family of four or five kids, maybe more. The other thing that has changed is that there are a lot more teenagers these days. It does my heart good to see so many teens who come out of the closet at such a young age. To me, coming out at 15 is amazing since I came out at 21. Wow, the years that have flown by. The old radical activist, member of Queer Nation and ACT-UP and Lesbian Avengers that I was feels somewhat ambiguous about how things have changed. On the one hand, this is what we worked for. This is what it is all about, creating a world where lesbians and gays can come together with our families. On the other hand, this means that things have been toned down considerably to accommodate the families. It’s not quite as queer, not quite as radical, not quite as in-your-face as it used to be. But this is the goal of all liberation movements, to become irrelevant which is not to say that the gay rights movement is irrelevant yet. Not nearly yet. But this is still no longer what it once was.

I started my day with talking to Debra Floyd, someone I met when I was a wee young baby dyke and she took me and Tracy and Nicole under wings.

Perhaps this feeling of nostalgic ennui is that because my son and my best friend, Jeff, are away at war and my father is ten years gone, almost to the day. (It will have been 10 years on July 1st). Whatever the reason, I feel very subdued today. Quiet and non-talkative. I don’t have much motivation to hang out at the Festival afterward although we almost certainly will.