Dispatch from Pride Houston 2011
By Daniel Rigney
“Pride Houston” sounds like an event the local Chamber of Commerce might have synthesized, but it’s actually the event formerly known as the Gay (or GLBT) Pride Parade. I'm participating in the parade this year for the first time, walking behind the banner of the Unitarian Universalist (UU) churches of Houston.
As I walk, I try to pay close attention to passing details, scribbling a few blognotes along the way as we follow the mile-long parade route across Westheimer, past the restaurants and bars and theaters and tattoo art houses, toward Houston’s sparkling night skyline.
It’s now 11 p.m., Saturday, June 25, 2011. I just got home, and I’m sitting down to rest my feet and collect my thoughts and impressions here on the word-jazz keyboard.
Our parade route has taken us through the heart of the Montrose. One of the many things that may surprise newcomers to Houston (as we are) is that the city has a fairly large and visible gay and lesbian community, centered in the Montrose area near the Museum District. Our popular mayor, Annise Parker, is an out lesbian, and I haven’t met anyone yet for whom that’s a problem. But then I haven’t met many Houstonians yet, and the ones I know here in my university and Unitarian social pods are not representative of Greater Houston.
Would that they were. I grew up not far from Houston, on the edge of the Deep South (Would that make it the Shallow South?), and I could tell you stories about what this region was like in the 1950’s and 1960s. Maybe another time. Even today, southeast Texas remains a conservatarian stronghold.
This morning’s Houston Chronicle played up the Pride parade on its editorial page. This is not just a gay event, the editors emphasized. It’s an event for the whole city. Well said. Houston -- and the country it’s in -- have come a long way since the Stonewall uprising, the birthing event that Pride Houston honors. In June of 1969, according to legend, gay patrons in a mafia-controlled New York bar refused to let bullying cops treat them like second-class citizens. They fought back. This was gay dignity’s Rosa Parks moment.
So we’re moving forward – gay and straight alongside each other -- in Houston Pride, a slow-flowing river of diverse humanity numbering in the tens of thousands, I would guess, if we count both walkers and curbstanders. They also serve who stand on the curb.
[Postscript: This morning's Chronicle estimates the crowd at 150,000. I later hear that New York is expecting a half-million today.]
Our Unitarian-Universalist pace car and limousine tonight is a stubby and wonderfully retro late-model navy-blue Plymouth PT Cruiser convertible with top down, its driver and passengers waving cheerfully to the noisy crowd. The limo is flying the six-striped "rainbow flag." I walk alongside pretending to be a secret service agent on a presidential motorcade.
Ahead of us in the parade is an armada of local affinity groups. I haven’t seen official Baptist or Catholic groups so far, but I’ll keep looking for their banners. And looking. I'm sure Baptists and Catholics are here. Just not officially.
Our UU group, banner forward, follows in the musical wake of a transgender float blaring Helen Reddy’s now-classic anthem “I Am Woman.” The transgender group is followed by a gay and lesbian support group from the University of Houston, and we in turn follow them. Behind us are representatives of a Houston law firm (any partners, I wonder?). Also in the mix are students from Rice University and a merry band of rifle-twirlers, mostly male.
The atmosphere is festive, even celebratory. This morning’s headlines have brought news of the passage of a an important gay marriage bill in the New York State Senate. Progressive politicians are seeing and being seen in the parade, sending a strong signal of their support for the gay love agenda.
Our river of moving humanity flows past cheering spectators standing on the concrete banks. They greet us with wild waves and a loud and continuous “Woooooohhh!” the entire way. Clapping, cheering, shouting. People in the street. People on the sidewalks, People on the balconies. People on the rooftops, people on scaffolds and in bleachers, yelling “Wooooohhh,” like a roaring communal Om. Or like a more politicized and less drunken and suffocating Mardi Gras.
People on the curb reach out to high-five me. I’m too socially flat-footed to respond quickly enough. About twenty young people along the route plead with me to give them the small rainbow flag I’m carrying. I quickly learn to say “Sorry, it’s not mine” with a regretful shrug.
The UU churches will collect these flags later to reuse in next year’s parade, and the one after that, and the one after that. The Pride parade is by now a well-entrenched annual urban, national and even international historical tradition. Not just a tradition, but a Tradition. Get used to it, as the saying goes.
The rainbow flag befits the crowd’s demographic diversity. Members of the crowd, each distinctive in some way, appear to be largely Anglo (as we say in south Texas), but also include large numbers of Black, Hispanic and some Asian celebrants as well. One group's banner, in fact, reads “Asians and Friends.”
I see people displaying a wide assortment of body sizes and physiques, of gender performances, of skin hues. Racially or ethnically mixed couples and groups, both male and female, are commonplace. This is the future my Southern grandmother warned me about.
The crowd is youngish, but with a few silverbacks like me in the blend. Hard to say whether there are more men than women. I don’t really know for sure who in this crowd is gay and who isn’t. Mostly gay, I would assume, but I didn’t ask. They didn’t tell. Who cares? This parade is not just about sexual orientation. It’s also about everyone's civil rights. And about having fun together.
Although this is my first Pride event, I'm an experienced veteran of other civil rights events, having attended many MLK marches with my family and university colleagues in San Antonio, a city that knows how to fiesta. I remember well the exhilaration I felt among kindred spirits in marches that drew more than 50,000 participants, heads bobbing as far as the eye could see. Events like these, apart from their symbolic significance, are amazingly interesting and entertaining and inspiring to me. The two events – MLK and Pride – are strikingly similar in many ways. Both are civil rights festivals. The MLK may be more political than Pride. MLK is explicitly a march, not a parade, commemorating those who marched in years past when doing so wasn’t safe, and was sometimes lethal. But then being gay has also been lethal at times, and not just in Wyoming.
MLK is also a bit more solemn, perhaps. Pride is a more exuberant and playful occasion, complete with dragsters (not the racecar kind), moms, dads, kids, religious and secular liberals, family and friends of gays and lesbians, Mardi-Gras-style bead-throwers, Democrats and Logcabicans, dancers, prancers, cupids and vixens.
Sorry no pets, unless you count the road-appleing horses (watch your step) carrying the mounted police, whose uniformed peacekeeping has been uniformly professional and helpful tonight as far as I can see. We’ve all come a long way since Stonewall and Bull Connor. Well, most of us have.
The sound system on the transgender float ahead of us strikes up another classic anthem: Kool and the Gang's “Celebration Time,” and then Sly and the Family Stone's timeless “We Are Family.” This event is one Unitarian-American’s idea of expressing family values.
We come to the end of the parade route. Some in my UU group disperse, but I swim to the banks of the human river to watch the rest of the parade. The age-old problem: How do you watch a parade while you’re in it? Solution: You find a way to do a little of both.
I take a place on the sidewalk near the end of the route and watch those who have been walking behind me all along -- among them the Houston Pride Band, the Macy’s employees (though this is no Macy’s Day Parade), a brigade of emergency medical personnel, and the Green Party, which proudly advertises a political platform that includes a plank supporting gay marriage.
The biggest cheer of the night greets a group of maybe forty or fifty NASA employees and their families. This is one Unitarian-American's idea of a patriotic moment.
But the most poignant moment, for me, comes when the PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) folks float past and a young man standing directly in front of me calls out repeatedly from the curb, “I love you, Mom! I love you, Mom!” A middle-aged woman from the PFLAG ranks walks toward him. They share a long, long tearful embrace and some quiet words.
Nothing can top that tonight. I’ve gone home to write about it.
http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram
By Daniel Rigney
“Pride Houston” sounds like an event the local Chamber of Commerce might have synthesized, but it’s actually the event formerly known as the Gay (or GLBT) Pride Parade. I'm participating in the parade this year for the first time, walking behind the banner of the Unitarian Universalist (UU) churches of Houston.
As I walk, I try to pay close attention to passing details, scribbling a few blognotes along the way as we follow the mile-long parade route across Westheimer, past the restaurants and bars and theaters and tattoo art houses, toward Houston’s sparkling night skyline.
It’s now 11 p.m., Saturday, June 25, 2011. I just got home, and I’m sitting down to rest my feet and collect my thoughts and impressions here on the word-jazz keyboard.
Our parade route has taken us through the heart of the Montrose. One of the many things that may surprise newcomers to Houston (as we are) is that the city has a fairly large and visible gay and lesbian community, centered in the Montrose area near the Museum District. Our popular mayor, Annise Parker, is an out lesbian, and I haven’t met anyone yet for whom that’s a problem. But then I haven’t met many Houstonians yet, and the ones I know here in my university and Unitarian social pods are not representative of Greater Houston.
Would that they were. I grew up not far from Houston, on the edge of the Deep South (Would that make it the Shallow South?), and I could tell you stories about what this region was like in the 1950’s and 1960s. Maybe another time. Even today, southeast Texas remains a conservatarian stronghold.
This morning’s Houston Chronicle played up the Pride parade on its editorial page. This is not just a gay event, the editors emphasized. It’s an event for the whole city. Well said. Houston -- and the country it’s in -- have come a long way since the Stonewall uprising, the birthing event that Pride Houston honors. In June of 1969, according to legend, gay patrons in a mafia-controlled New York bar refused to let bullying cops treat them like second-class citizens. They fought back. This was gay dignity’s Rosa Parks moment.
So we’re moving forward – gay and straight alongside each other -- in Houston Pride, a slow-flowing river of diverse humanity numbering in the tens of thousands, I would guess, if we count both walkers and curbstanders. They also serve who stand on the curb.
[Postscript: This morning's Chronicle estimates the crowd at 150,000. I later hear that New York is expecting a half-million today.]
Our Unitarian-Universalist pace car and limousine tonight is a stubby and wonderfully retro late-model navy-blue Plymouth PT Cruiser convertible with top down, its driver and passengers waving cheerfully to the noisy crowd. The limo is flying the six-striped "rainbow flag." I walk alongside pretending to be a secret service agent on a presidential motorcade.
Ahead of us in the parade is an armada of local affinity groups. I haven’t seen official Baptist or Catholic groups so far, but I’ll keep looking for their banners. And looking. I'm sure Baptists and Catholics are here. Just not officially.
Our UU group, banner forward, follows in the musical wake of a transgender float blaring Helen Reddy’s now-classic anthem “I Am Woman.” The transgender group is followed by a gay and lesbian support group from the University of Houston, and we in turn follow them. Behind us are representatives of a Houston law firm (any partners, I wonder?). Also in the mix are students from Rice University and a merry band of rifle-twirlers, mostly male.
The atmosphere is festive, even celebratory. This morning’s headlines have brought news of the passage of a an important gay marriage bill in the New York State Senate. Progressive politicians are seeing and being seen in the parade, sending a strong signal of their support for the gay love agenda.
Our river of moving humanity flows past cheering spectators standing on the concrete banks. They greet us with wild waves and a loud and continuous “Woooooohhh!” the entire way. Clapping, cheering, shouting. People in the street. People on the sidewalks, People on the balconies. People on the rooftops, people on scaffolds and in bleachers, yelling “Wooooohhh,” like a roaring communal Om. Or like a more politicized and less drunken and suffocating Mardi Gras.
People on the curb reach out to high-five me. I’m too socially flat-footed to respond quickly enough. About twenty young people along the route plead with me to give them the small rainbow flag I’m carrying. I quickly learn to say “Sorry, it’s not mine” with a regretful shrug.
The UU churches will collect these flags later to reuse in next year’s parade, and the one after that, and the one after that. The Pride parade is by now a well-entrenched annual urban, national and even international historical tradition. Not just a tradition, but a Tradition. Get used to it, as the saying goes.
The rainbow flag befits the crowd’s demographic diversity. Members of the crowd, each distinctive in some way, appear to be largely Anglo (as we say in south Texas), but also include large numbers of Black, Hispanic and some Asian celebrants as well. One group's banner, in fact, reads “Asians and Friends.”
I see people displaying a wide assortment of body sizes and physiques, of gender performances, of skin hues. Racially or ethnically mixed couples and groups, both male and female, are commonplace. This is the future my Southern grandmother warned me about.
The crowd is youngish, but with a few silverbacks like me in the blend. Hard to say whether there are more men than women. I don’t really know for sure who in this crowd is gay and who isn’t. Mostly gay, I would assume, but I didn’t ask. They didn’t tell. Who cares? This parade is not just about sexual orientation. It’s also about everyone's civil rights. And about having fun together.
Although this is my first Pride event, I'm an experienced veteran of other civil rights events, having attended many MLK marches with my family and university colleagues in San Antonio, a city that knows how to fiesta. I remember well the exhilaration I felt among kindred spirits in marches that drew more than 50,000 participants, heads bobbing as far as the eye could see. Events like these, apart from their symbolic significance, are amazingly interesting and entertaining and inspiring to me. The two events – MLK and Pride – are strikingly similar in many ways. Both are civil rights festivals. The MLK may be more political than Pride. MLK is explicitly a march, not a parade, commemorating those who marched in years past when doing so wasn’t safe, and was sometimes lethal. But then being gay has also been lethal at times, and not just in Wyoming.
MLK is also a bit more solemn, perhaps. Pride is a more exuberant and playful occasion, complete with dragsters (not the racecar kind), moms, dads, kids, religious and secular liberals, family and friends of gays and lesbians, Mardi-Gras-style bead-throwers, Democrats and Logcabicans, dancers, prancers, cupids and vixens.
Sorry no pets, unless you count the road-appleing horses (watch your step) carrying the mounted police, whose uniformed peacekeeping has been uniformly professional and helpful tonight as far as I can see. We’ve all come a long way since Stonewall and Bull Connor. Well, most of us have.
The sound system on the transgender float ahead of us strikes up another classic anthem: Kool and the Gang's “Celebration Time,” and then Sly and the Family Stone's timeless “We Are Family.” This event is one Unitarian-American’s idea of expressing family values.
We come to the end of the parade route. Some in my UU group disperse, but I swim to the banks of the human river to watch the rest of the parade. The age-old problem: How do you watch a parade while you’re in it? Solution: You find a way to do a little of both.
I take a place on the sidewalk near the end of the route and watch those who have been walking behind me all along -- among them the Houston Pride Band, the Macy’s employees (though this is no Macy’s Day Parade), a brigade of emergency medical personnel, and the Green Party, which proudly advertises a political platform that includes a plank supporting gay marriage.
The biggest cheer of the night greets a group of maybe forty or fifty NASA employees and their families. This is one Unitarian-American's idea of a patriotic moment.
But the most poignant moment, for me, comes when the PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) folks float past and a young man standing directly in front of me calls out repeatedly from the curb, “I love you, Mom! I love you, Mom!” A middle-aged woman from the PFLAG ranks walks toward him. They share a long, long tearful embrace and some quiet words.
Nothing can top that tonight. I’ve gone home to write about it.
http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram
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