Pride Parade: Marching and More.

So, for the city’s Pride Parade, I took up the invitation of a radical socialist queer activist group that I’ve protested with a few times, and rounded up a friend from school and his boyfriend and marched.

Usually I dislike the unpragmaticness of radical socialists, but the leader of this group picks great targets, has effective messaging, and always gets great media coverage for protests (e.g. of the city’s gay-hating Roman Catholic cardinal, or an evangelical pastor who gave lectures in Uganda and helped whip up the homophobia that killed a major activist there and led to the introduction of a draconian anti-gay bill in that country’s parliament).

Like most radical socialist groups, the people who turned out were very motley, and many of them were linked to the city’s Occupy movement.

One guy I was talking to was this stringy-haired moustached tattoed-up (white) guy in his early 50s...  He was a roofer from an industrial part of a neighboring, very Republican state, and had met the leader of the queer group through contacts from Occupy.

As the guy told me his story, it came out that he wasn’t gay, but was married to a cool woman who put up with his bullshit, and was with him as he got off IV drugs.

“I’ve been sober for ten years,” he was like.

He also said that he was a white trash homophobe and racist, but contacts with different people through life experiences made him realize what an asshole he was and how much harm he had done, and so now he tries to make amends by going out of his way to march for and fight for different groups that he’d wronged.

“I’m for everyone,” he was like, “Except maybe white trash like I was.”

He also said that people where he lives don’t just have the same exposure to gay issues, and the other day a young (white) guy he roofs with started saying some bullshit about gay people, and so he told him that he was going to the Pride Parade, and invited him to come.

“He shut up real fast,” he was like, and then said that he was sorry that the guy didn’t come, it would have been a growth experience.

Overall, one of the 2 main causes the group was messaging in the march – they even made sure that the people w/the 2 groups of signs split up into a front contingent and a back contingent, to maximize issue visibility! – was “Free Bradley Manning,” since he’s a (gay) hero and fought for human rights by leaking info about U.S. military atrocities in Iraq, even though that’s not as topical as gay marriage, the other issue the group was pushing for in the march.

They even had these little bright pink Bradley Manning stickers made up, and as the (retired) (straight) (transvestite) (white) (male) public school teacher went around giving them to everyone, he slapped them on their chests, and then asked everyone to put one on their backs, too, for double visibility.

“There!”, he was like, slapping a sticker on my back.  “That’ll make a nice target.”

He was only half-kidding; a lot of the city’s Anonymous hacker collective chapter showed up in Guy Fawkes masks to march with us because of the renewed importance of defending a Wikileaker in light of the Ed Snowden debacle, and I kept wondering if the government was taking note of everyone who was there, because of that.

Isn’t that sick, to have to worry about your own government like that?

When our parade section finally mobilized to march – we were in the middle of the line-up, and had to wait around about 45 minutes after start-time – I made sure to grab one of the 2 Spanish-language protest signs, this bright pink one declaring –

!DERECHOS PARA TODOS!

- and I marched along the edge of the group, so that I could high-five the groups of Mexican lesbians among the front rows of spectators.

A Mexican (gay) couple also had me stop and pose with my sign for a picture – you know that shit is going on Facebook! – and like 2 other times some young drunk (Mexican) (gay) guy saw me and started screaming out, “!Para todos!, !para todos!”.

Oddly, there were a number of mutli-generational (Mexican) families there, and like 3 times I saw an old (Mexican) grandmother who was like 90 and wizened and about 4-feet high just light up in a smile when she saw me carrying a Spanish-language sign.

I always made sure to go out of my way to shake her hand or give her a high-five.

Solidarity!