Oklahoma City Pride 2010

I've only been to the PRIDE parade in St. Louis once. It was three years ago and a good friend basically dragged me there. I did have a good time though and it blew my self imposed sheltered existence wide open. I'd never seen so much color, so much skin, so much flamboyance in one place. I was reeling, I think my friend had to constantly ask if I was alright. Flash forward a year, 12 months to get more comfortable...to become me. I actually missed the parade to pick up a good friend at the airport, a trip I deemed more important and more relevant at the time. It turned out to be a poor decision and I found myself longing to be in the crowd where a person's ultimate goal is to get a set of rainbow beads, where drag queens take off their own beautiful beads so you can get the one color you're missing...where no matter the sex, gender, stye of dress, age, or race everyone goes out of their way to make sure a stranger is having a good time. It's ironic that religious groups picket Pride; Pride is the only event I have ever been to where I've felt surrounded by love. I missed all of that. I had to wait 12 more months to experience it again.

One of my projects here in Oklahoma was to help plan and participate in the OKC Pride event. I went from my first Pride in St. Louis where I essentially jumped around a bit and went home exhausted to actually being IN the parade. The organization I'm working at put together a float (read pickup truck) and I was expected to march in the parade and run through the crowd passing out materials with our organization's information on it. We had tattoos, mood cups, rainbow bracelets (like the livestrong ones), and t-shirts. People go crazy for free shit. I soon found myself surrounded by all walks of life. In one particular instance I was surrounded by a group of gay boys in their underwear desperate for mood cups, I of course obliged. Later as I was handing out bracelets an individual (I assume male) grasped me from behind and asked "sugar I would just love one of those bracelets". Haha, he called me sugar. My own grandmother would never call me sugar...I gave him 5.

At Pride I was never once called young man and aside from a few people who were a little too grabby for the merchandise, everyone was wonderful. I especially loved the little kids screaming "Happy Pride" to everyone as they walked by and the team of gay guys in their front yard passing out water they purchased to every person walking in the heat. The adrenaline was pumping so hard I didn't even realize I had run the 3 mile course in flip flops. My feet were killing me the next morning, I also discovered a rather large bruise on my left bicep that I couldn't for the life of me remember how it got there.

But anyway, happy pride everybody! Future posts will entail the very exciting process of teaching the cat to use the cat door, changing the lightbulb in our motion detectors, and the grant appreciation lunch I went to today.