Pride Parade

I could not resist the Pride parade yesterday. Here are some photos.

The first 5 photos are during the staging preparations. The pretty-much naked fellow loved to pose and dance around. I’m sure he has a full frontal somewhere on the internet but I couldn’t bring myself to post the one I have. There were other young guys who ran around naked in the parade who were less self-consciously made up than this fellow. The sense of excitement during the staging was as fun as the parade itself. I walked up Mrket to find a spot to watch and a man and his wife let me slip in front of them. He said they’d seen the parade many times. I haven’t enjoyed a parade so much since the 4th of July Parade when I was a kid! Everyone got in on it, from the American Legion and law enforcement to the mayor to Episcopalian and Lutheran churches.

A friend told me how the Pride Parade got started and I learned a piece I’d not heard before. The Stonewall riots in 1969 were the genesis but the piece I didn’t know was that that was the day of Judy Garland’s funeral and, as my friend tells it, the dykes and the drag queens were all in mourning and would NOT tolerate police harassment on the day of their icon’s funeral. The way they identified each other in those days was as “a friend of Dorothy.”