JUNE 9, 1995

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 9

SPEAK OUT

Hey Marilyn, let's strut our stuff at Pride

by Mubarak S. Dahir

This month is the High Holy Season of the gay community: Everywhere around the country, we are preparing for our annual gay and lesbian pride parades.

The idea behind pride parades, more or less, is that we take to the streets to show the world (and ourselves) that we are not ashamed of who we are, and we are not afraid to strut it in public.

But as the years have passed, a lot of gay men and lesbians have become ashamed of these events. Recently, so have I, though for a much different reason.

Pride marches got their start in 1970, when gays and lesbians around the country began holding parades to celebrate

leathermen wer discouraged, if not outright banned in some instances. They were replaced with men in striped polo shirts and Doc Martens carrying signs saying, in effect, "I am normal!"

The parades turned respectable, dignified, and proper. In short, they got boring. And the poor TV camera guys had to search a lot harder to find those Marilyn Monroe clones.

All this in the name of showing the true "diversity" of the gay and lesbian community. But in our rush to appear acceptable, what we've really done is smother our diver-

If I want to see a bunch of

guys in button-down shirts

and women pushing strollers, I'll go to the mall, thank you very much.

the first anniversery of the Stonewall uprising.

Traditionally, the celebrations offered gay men an lesbians a time to come out in full regalia-whatever we wanted that regalia to be-and let our hair down, both literally and figuratively. In cities like San Francisco and New York the marches became legendary: men in outrageous gowns, dykes on bikes, and everything in between.

Of course, all this gallivanting around in weird clothes had its drawbacks. Year after year, the television crews captured the contingents of six-foot Marilyn Monroe lookalikes rather than the lesbian mothers pushing their baby strollers.

And it wasn't long before our foes, particularly those in the radical right, started using these innocent images of fun to misrepresent us to the public and to politicians.

As a result, many of my gay and lesbian counterparts concerned with Respectability started expressing their fears about our "image problem."

So the tone of a lot of parades, save those meccas of gaiety like San Francisco and New York, shifted. The drag queens and

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sity. I don't know about you, but if I want to see a bunch

of guys in buttondown shirts and women pushing strollers, I'll go to the mall, thank you very much.

There's no denying that a gay pride parade, and the fact that we still have to have them, has political undertones. But one of the things I have always loved about being gay is that our community knows how to put on a party. Even while we are forced to fight daily for our personal and civil rights, we have always been able to maintain a sense of humor about ourselves and the world we are so often forced to look at from an outsider's perspective.

I wouldn't trade that for all the Respectability in America.

This year the pride parade in my home city is going to be part of a full weekend package of events, with a schedule of Very Important Things like a seminar on women-owned businesses and a workshop with gay lawyers and an education forum with gay teachers. (Sorry, nothing on the agenda dealing with make-up tips.)

It would be great if some local heterosexuals came out and took advantage of these events to learn more about who we as gay men and lesbians in the community really are.

But as for myself, I'm gonna be hanging out with the Marilyn Monroe look-alikes.

Marie G. Bielefeld,,AWD,

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