Skipping Towards Gomorrah (32 page)

Anyone who has been to a gay-pride parade or sat in their church basement and watched an antigay group's video of a pride parade knows exactly what was parading up and down Santa Monica Boulevard. All the usual suspects were there: a few beer trucks, some dykes on bikes, a few drag queens melting in the sun, a few half-assed floats, a few political groups, a few religious groups, and a few Christians holding up signs with Matthew Shephard's image and FAG MATT BURNS IN HELL! written on them. The gay Latino groups went all out, putting together elaborate floats and costumes—which was a treat for me; I've always had a weakness for the Aztec warriors pictured in murals in Mexican restaurants.

This being L.A., there were also hundreds of guys marching around in their underwear—including a car full of beautiful boys sponsored by a West Hollywood bar famous for filling its dance floor with six-foot-high mounds of soap suds, attracting crowds of beautiful, nearly naked men who dance (and, uh, more) under the cover of soap suds. The beautiful boys who work at the bar were carrying buckets of sudsy water and sponges. When they saw someone attractive in the crowd, they ran up and soaked the hot-tie with suds. When Tim, Kevin, Jake, and their good-looking friends saw the float coming, they moved to the back of the sidewalk to avoid being assaulted.

One guy on the soap suds brigade stood out. He was an older man in a lime-green thong and nothing else. (It's entirely possible he was “wearing” a pride butt plug, too.) It was really all about his dick, of course, which appeared to be a foot long. I found him appalling—and not because I have a problem with nudity. Or foot-long dicks. No, I have a problem with
thongs.
I would rather the guy were marching nude. Somehow it didn't fill my heart with pride to see Thong Man marching along, cigarette stuck in his mouth, his lime-green dick being batted back and forth by his thighs.

Curious how Thong Man's big cock was playing with the kids—you know, the gay youth Kevin and Jake and Tim were here to fill with hope—I began looking around for some gay youth. Oddly enough, I couldn't find any. There were a hundred thousand people at the parade, give or take a few thousand, so there had to be gay youth somewhere. But I couldn't find one.

Unlike the antigay groups who videotape pride parades in an effort to scare checks out of grannies, I wasn't bothered by Thong Man's overt sexual display. Nor was I bothered by this year's crop of sleazy gay T-shirts for sale at Don't Panic, West Hollywood's Ye Olde Gay Pride Shoppe: I JUST DID YOUR BOYFRIEND; SLEEPS WELL WITH OTHERS; PORN STAR IN TRAINING; INSTANT SLUT—JUST ADD ALCOHOL; FLAVOR OF THE WEEK; and my personal favorite, IF I WANT TO HEAR WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY, I'LL TAKE MY COCK OUT OF YOUR MOUTH. Some might view Thong Man or filthy T-shirts—which were selling like hotcakes, of course—as a sad comment on gay men. We're too focused on sex, and the gay pride parade is too sexual.

To my mind, the overtly sexual displays at gay pride parades are much less offensive than the idiotic gay-is-good rhetoric. Being gay is about sex; sex is, after all, the thing that separates gay people from straight people. Who we desire and who we fall in love with sets us apart, makes us feel different, and that difference has social and political dimensions. So overt displays of sex—the good (Aztec Warrior), the bad (Soap Sud Assaults), and the ugly (Thong Man)—have a place in a gay pride parade, in much the same way that overt displays of Irishness—beer and shamrocks and beer and whiskey and beer—have a place in Saint Patrick's Day parades.

In fact, gay pride parades and the Saint Patrick's Day parades have more in common than Bill O'Reilly might like to admit.

Saint Patrick's Day parades were not always the respectable white-ethnic love fests they are today. When Irish Catholic immigrants first began coming to the United States in the 1830s to dig canals, and then kept coming in the 1840s to escape the famine, these early Irish Catholic immigrants were despised and discriminated against by “native” Americans—a term that used to mean WASPs born in the United States. Irish Catholics were thought to be inherently un-American, as they owed fealty to a foreign prince, the pope, and couldn't be trusted. The Irish were America's first urban social problem, as they crowded the slums and married free blacks.

The original Saint Patrick's Day celebrations in New York City and Boston in the early to mid-1800s were not the Everyone-Is-Irish-on-Saint-Patrick's-Day sentimental shamrocks-and-green-beer festivals of today. (“For one thing, the Irish drank whiskey,” says my brother Bill. “Beer was a German thing.” Luckily for my family, we're a quarter German.) Celebrating the feast of Saint Patrick—a Roman Catholic religious holiday—by parading around the city and proclaiming, essentially, “We're here, we're Irish, get used to it,” was a slap in the face of the Nativist/Protestant majority. Mainstream Americans circa 1850 considered the Saint Patrick's Day parade a deeply offensive spectacle. Early Saint Patrick's Day parades were often attacked by anti-Irish mobs.

“Saint Patrick's Day parades were an assertion of identity by a category of people that many Americans wished would go away,” says Bill, who teaches American Literature at Northwestern University outside of Chicago. “The fact that Saint Pat's now celebrates a stereotypical Irishness (drink, sentimental songs, drink, sentimental poetry, drink, brawling, sentimental making up after fisticuffs, drink) instead of an aggressive form of identity politics perhaps indicates that someday gay pride parades will be just as watered down. Who knows? Maybe one day everyone will be gay on gay pride day, just as we're all Irish on Saint Patrick's Day.”

If my brother is correct—and he's never given me cause to doubt him—we may one day see Bill O'Reilly prancing down Fifth Avenue in a bra and high heels, wearing a KISS ME, I'M GAY button on his rainbow-striped bowler hat. It's almost too horrible to contemplate.

 

K
evin and Jake, Tim and Tan Man, and the rest of their friends gathered at the gates to the Pride Festival, a separate event that you needed a ticket to get into. We found a patch of shade under a tree and sat on the ground. Someone ran off to buy tickets to the festival; Jake strolled over to a Mexican man selling bottles of water out of a beer cooler on the corner.

Kevin and his friends intended to spend the rest of the day dancing in one of three tents set up on the festival site. Big name DJs would be spinning, and now that Kevin and his friends had done their good deed for the day—they'd gone to the parade, stuffed the kids with hope—it was time to pursue some grown-up happiness: Kevin pulled a little plastic packet out of his pocket and distributed ecstasy tablets to all his friends. His treat, he told us.

I'm not big on DJs or dancing or tents . . . but I do enjoy recreational drugs. Or I
did
enjoy them, I should say. Um, gee. Okay, time to come clean about all the other drugs I've used. Frankly, I've tried 'em all. Thankfully, I don't have an addictive personality (really, Laura, I don't), and when I've safely and responsibly used and enjoyed drugs like ecstasy, coke, acid, mushrooms, and GHB, my first impulse was never to rush out and do it again right away. Instead, I've always thought to myself, “Hey, that was fun. Maybe I'll do that drug again in a year or two.” I don't understand people who find a drug they like and then use it on a daily or weekly basis; if you use a particular drug constantly, the effects are less dramatic and pleasurable.

When I became a parent, of course, I gave up strong recreational drugs, limiting myself to alcohol and pot on those moments when I need to indulge that old-as-humanity drive to alter my consciousness. Even then, I drink or use pot only when the kid is in one place and I'm in another. I didn't swear off hard drugs because I was worried about popping my kid into a microwave oven, and I gave them up long before George W. Bush merged the War on Terrorism with the War on Drugs. I gave them up—everything but pot, and only that on exceedingly rare occasions—because being the parent of a small child means never having the luxury of being totally wasted or thoroughly indisposed or completely useless or hungover. So no more ecstasy or 'shrooms or acid or GHB for me.

Of course, seeing as my kid was in one state and I was in another, I made an exception and graciously accepted a hit of ecstasy from Kevin. Moderation in all things, that's my motto, and I believe it applies to moderation itself.

We weren't the only ones at the pride festival on ecstasy. After we handed our tickets to the volunteers at the gate and made our way past the security checkpoints, we passed through yet another line of volunteers: young, pretty straight women handing out little slips of pink paper. PARTY SMART! the flyers read. IT'S SUNNY AND IT'S HOT AND SOME CLUB DRUGS CAN CAUSE YOU TO BECOME DEHYDRATED. SO BE SURE TO DRINK LOTS OF WATER! These slips of paper were handed to everyone who entered the festival, a huge public park that had been fenced off for the day, a park filled with food vendors, information tables, dance tents, and people selling gay pride merchandise (butt plugs, anklets, teddy bears), and tens of thousands of homosexuals. Warning everyone who entered the festival about drug-related dehydration seemed to me an admission on the part of the gay pride festival organizers that more people at the festival were on drugs than not.

Anyone who expects this to turn into an after-school special is going to be disappointed. In most films, books, and on television, the introduction of hard drugs into the plotline usually foreshadows some sad or tragic event. Let me end the suspense right now: No one in our little group overdosed or freaked out or died. We had fun, stayed hydrated, and made it home in one piece. The moral of this story? Recreational drugs, used in moderation, can be wonderful. Ecstasy is particularly wonderful; you fall in love with the world on ecstasy and find yourself telling people things you might have a hard time expressing if you weren't “rolling on E,” as the kids like to say. For instance, ecstasy helped me tell Tim how much I liked his teeth.

“So are you having fun?” Kevin asked, throwing an arm around my shoulder. Yes, I was having fun, I admitted. In fact, I was having a blast. I was having fun laughing at the freaks, ogling the good-looking guys, and admiring Tim's, um, teeth. The sun was fun; the heat was fun. Hell, even the thongs were fun. But where were the kids?

“The kids?”

Yeah, the kids, the gay youth. The whole point of the pride parade, he told me, was reaching out to gay youth, giving 'em hope, letting 'em know we're hot and hideous, young and old, smooth and hairy. I pointed out that the youngest people at the parade and the festival seemed to be in their mid-twenties. And there weren't that many of them. The average age looked to be thirty-three. Kevin smiled and shrugged.

“Oh, yeah, gay kids . . . ,” said Kevin. “Well, it's about fun, too. Fun and kids, and if the kids don't come, well, we still get to have fun. The first time I went to the parade I was, like, nineteen years old and already out,” he continued. “You have to be out already to come to something like this. What it did, though, what's important about it, is that it made me feel more comfortable with being gay. It made me more confident.”

“Oh, stop it, you two,” said Jake, shirtless, sweaty, and fresh from the dance tent. “Blah blah blah. Enough with the gay youth already. Pride parades are like slings. Tell people you've got a sling, and they're clutching their pearls. ‘Oh, my God, you've got a sling!' But fucking in a sling is fun. Same with the pride parade. Tell people you're going and they can't believe you would even want to. But once they get their asses to the parade they have a great fucking time. And having fun is important—it's the whole point.”

The whole point?

“Sure,” Jake says. “When we were young, everyone said that the gays were unhappy and no one likes us and that our lives would be miserable. What better way to disprove all of that crap than having fun? With thousands of other ‘miserable' gay people? In public? The party is the purpose of all of this. Pleasure is the whole point.”

Jake was right: Pleasure was the whole point. There we all were, pursuing happiness, being responsible (making sure we kept hydrated), good citizens (helping that straight man push his truck), happy, happy high people. It wasn't about pride booster shots, keeping shame at bay, political liberation, or helping youth. We were there to have fun. But why did it take all day and a hit of ecstasy before any of us could admit it?

 

I
t's odd that people who have to reject conventional concepts of morality to justify their own existence can be so conventional when it comes to justifying their own pleasures. But the average fag won't tell a writer or a reporter that he's going to the pride parade to watch boys or hang out with his friends or take drugs and dance. No, he's going to give gay youth hope. Somehow I can't imagine the few gay teenagers who at the Los Angeles pride parade or festival derived much in the way of hope watching Kevin and Jake get high and dance with their shirts off. I can't imagine that the man in the lime-green thong did much to lift their spirits, any more than one man I saw dragging his much younger boyfriend around on a leash (black leather, not rainbow-striped). No one at L.A.'s gay pride parade was committing the sin of pride, as it turned out, just the sin of a good time. Isn't it funny that it took all day, illegal drugs, the heat of the sun, and two hours on the dance floor for everyone to drop the pretense and admit that the parade was about fun and pleasure and their particular pursuit of happiness?

Gay pride parades are bacchanals—ass-kicking, ass-licking parties—and perhaps it's time for gay people to admit it. We feel obligated, though, to wrap the pride parade up in goody-goody rationalizations, such as “We're here to help gay youth,” or “We're fighting for political liberation!” Gays aren't the only Americans who feel obligated to rationalize their pleasures in this manner; pleasure-hating Puritanism runs deep in the United States. (When it came time to carve up the continent, Canada got the French, and the United States got the Puritans and their descendants. I don't know about you, but I'd rather we got the French.) Even hedonists in America have a hard time viewing simple pleasure as a legitimate pursuit: marijuana-legalization activists want to ease the suffering of people with glaucoma; swinging couples approach nonswinger couples because the lifestyle is a great way to enhance a marriage; casinos create new tax revenues that states can turn around and spend on schools.