Declaring yourself is now so routine (at least among people in more liberal communities) that we forget the desperation in Harvey Milk’s 1978 entreaty that everyone who was gay come out if any progress was to be made.
The drag queens and gender-nonbinary youth at such events can appear preoccupied with their own ecstatic exhibitionism.īut Pride was not always so unabashedly celebratory for a long time, it was a radical assault on mainstream values, a means to defy the belief that homosexuality was a sin, an illness and a crime, that gay people were subhuman. They are fiestas that percolate through the cities and sometimes small towns of the developed world, as well as some parts of the rest of the world, and they mark the fact that gay people exist in numbers, provide documentary evidence that we have more fun and are more fabulous than anyone else, that we are gay in the old sense of the word. When we hear of Pride marches today, we tend to think of fuss and feathers, of men more than half-naked waving from rainbow-hued, Lurex-draped parade floats, of Dykes on Bikes who gun their motors in defiance of gender norms, of waving gay and trans celebrities.
