This weekend — unlike most Gay Pride celebrations which fall around June 28 — is DC’s time. Hubby and I live in the Semi-Ghetto, which doubles as one of the most pedestrian friendly living spaces in the metropolitan area. The rainbow flags are going up everywhere. The Painfully Liberal United Methodists are in the act. (I shouldn’t tease; they have sandwich and drinks outreach to the day laborers who congregate at my morning bus stop.) From our apartment window, I can see both the rainbow flags and the Leather/BDSM flags at a certain “adult” business. (Perhaps they have an “all you can beat” special.)
There’s a touch the neighborhood restaurants and bars are taking that you can do, too. If you have a fence with vertical rails, you can weave plastic tablecloths (bunched up the long way) in the six rainbow flag colors made up like a flag. It still baffles me how such a garrish emblem took hold.
What baffles me more is how this celebration — which seems more like a state fair than a drunken orgy, in case you’ve never been — can stay blissfully removed from the political realities of the age, and it gets more blissful (read: irrelevant) every year. Gay etc. people are the political punching bag of the year, and last year, and certainly next year, but on the one day you might expect some organization (if not protest; I do think that’s usually passe) nada.
God help us if we ever need to mobalize for something really important.
Politics take backseat at Pride (Washington Blade)
This is only very tangentially related to Pride, but we went to Pho 79 last night and I thought of you, particularly during the entertainment. 🙂