It’s Gay Pride weekend in New Orleans. Nearly every other queer community on the planet holds Pride in June to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, but after years of following that plan, New Orleans’ Pride organizers had become discouraged by the light crowds. They assumed the problem was the weather–June’s not usually scorching, but it’s not usually pleasant to be outside for long periods of time then either. So a couple of years ago, the Pride Committee moved the event to September/October (theoretically, to coincide with National Coming Out Day), assuming they’d have a larger turnout.
I think I can say they were mistaken.
Pride is held in Armstrong Park now, closer to the Fruit Loop–Ground Zero for gay bars and clubs. Spatially, it’s bigger than it used to be when Pride was held at Washington Square in the Marigny, but the crowd’s essentially the same size. And, of course, the gay parade still sucks–but to be fair, I guess it takes a lot to impress the New Orleanaise when it comes to parades.
So, anyway….
My first thought for the day is this: despite the fact that New Orleans has a long and colorful history as a homosexual haven, homosexuality doesn’t mean much here, politically or socially. In New Orleans, the most significant factor in determining your social worth is how many generations your family’s been here–and of course, bound up in that, how you rank economically. If you’re of a certain class and you’ve got three or more generations worth of New Orleanians in your photo album, you hang with certain people; they may be gay, they may be straight, but what binds you together–the identity that galvanizes you–is class. It works the same for most other minorities–in the African American community, for example: the Honores, the Glapions, the Hazeurs, they know they sit high in the pecking order and they aren’t afraid to let you know it, no matter who you are.
Second thought: homosexuality, when normative (e.g. on Eighth Avenue in New York, on Commercial Street in Provincetown, at the corner of Castro and 18th in San Francisco), is boring. It is herd-mentality incarnate, from the hackneyed political rhetoric to the rainbow shoelaces. Or maybe that’s just me and my homosexual “got-to-be-different” gene, afraid of the fact that I’ve been totally assimilated… Yeah, that’s probably it.
Final thought: tonight’s episode of The Simpsons revolved around Mr. Burns long-lost son (played by Rodney Dangerfield). But that’s not important. What’s important is that it ended with a massive street party scene, with every citizen of Springfield dancing to Journey’s “Anyway You Want It.” It’s a song I haven’t heard much since it came out in 1980, and it brought back a creepy wave of nostalgia: bad-ass, long-haired, beer-swilling girls driving Buick Regals up and down the main drag of town with their excitingly redneck boyfriends; the first time I kissed another boy and the conflicting emotions I felt as my lips rubbed across the stubble of his adolescent beard; my constant search for homosex in my hometown and the simultaneous fear that I’d one day be outed–not to my parents or even the general public, but to my friends (I guess like most teens, my parents were at the bottom of my list of concerns). It made my stomach churn. In a bad way and a good way.
Pretty scattered today, huh?
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