MY FIRST PRIDE IN SEATTLE

 At Pride, there's no such thing
as too much color. 

I survived Pride, Round One.

 

Okay, that sounds like there was suffering involved. I suppose that’s my default view of gay events with too much hoopla. It wasn’t that way this time. 

 

Did I thrive? Um, that’s overshooting a bit. 

 

I took it in and I got something good out of it. That sounds right. And, from my perspective, that means my Pride weekend in Seattle exceeded expectations. I wasn’t insufferable and neither was it. We coexisted gaily enough. 

 

Evan and I spent part of the hot Saturday afternoon on Capitol Hill, first meeting his friends for brunch and then walking along the closed off blocks on Broadway where temporary outdoor stages on each block featured drag queens lip synching with painted on smiles that belied the fact they must have been battling heat exhaustion under heavy wigs and layers of garments, outer leather jackets and faux furs shed not soon enough at the midway point of Lizzo’s “About Damn Time” and Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional.” Pride is prime time for any and all LGBTQ performers. Heck, even the local men’s underwear store had a go-go boy dancing on tiny platform. He went largely unnoticed, his belly larger than what would earn him a gig in a club that evening. I always feel badly when a performer can’t sustain attention, but he didn’t seem to be feeling anything at all. He didn’t need my pity.

 

I took in much of Saturday from my boyfriend’s point of view. Evan loved it, not showing a trace of my cynicism or reticence. After a couple of years without a robust celebration due to COVID, he relished the resurgence of a festival-like atmosphere. Several times, he told me the parade used to be on Capitol Hill, only being relocated to 4^th Avenue in downtown Seattle as corporate sponsorship swept in. Capitol Hill meant something to him as a gay man; 4^th Avenue did not.

 

We began Sunday as we often do, grabbing lattes at the café on the corner, biking around Lake Union and then going through the paces of an online workout led by Heather Robertson. I tried to bat away the feeling this was the calm before the storm. I’d survived Saturday’s big Pride event which was essentially a very slow walk winding through a crowd of people, rainbows everywhere. Sunday’s events would drag on longer, the sun even hotter. The only chance of cutting things short would be if I suffered heat exhaustion and wound up under a first aid canopy, as had been the case so long ago for eight-year-old me at the Toronto Zoo at the peak of a heat wave. My mother had stayed with me while the rest of the family trekked on in pursuit of bears and dik-dik. Classic case of déjà-vu: same but different.   

 

I felt relief when Evan restated last night’s decision: we’d skip the hours-long parade and hang out at Seattle Center where the parade ends. I’ve walked around the area countless times during my solo trips to the city. It was the site of the 1962 World’s Fair and the Space Needle, the monorail and a huge fountain remain, with the Chihuly Gardens and Frank Gehry’s colorful slabs of warped metal making up the Museum of Pop to keep the grounds interesting. Seeing the area awash in the colors of the rainbow would add an entirely new association. 

 

There may have been more flashes of skin than splashes of red, indigo and violet. I imagine queers are especially grateful that Marsha P. Johnson and other patrons of the Stonewall Inn rioted in late June instead of on some cold night in January. What would Winter Pride have looked like? Would Pride organizers in the early days have adhered to calendar-authentic snowman building contests and drag queen snow angels? Somewhere in northern Finland, there’s an alternate reality coat maker with patents on beer- and snow-resistant rainbow parkas ruing what could have been to the unsympathetic glances of a herd of reindeer.

 

Yes, Sunday was hot. It was the perfect excuse for the first immodestly dressed attendee we spotted as we locked our bikes: an overly tanned Batman, baring a large chest and chiseled midriff, rendering any fake muscle suit utterly unnecessary. The look wowed Evan but made me cringe. Please don’t let the afternoon devolve into a display of gym gods. My body’s fine for the moment, but I still feel I could work off the extra cinnamon buns I indulged in while in Sweden earlier in June. I’m trying to avoid one of my full-on eating disorder panic diets. 

 

As it turned out Batman was an outlier. I can’t recall seeing other caped crusaders or superheroes. While there were plenty of shirtless men and women and a number who opted for full nudity, with or without body paint, these were normal bodies, unwaxed and perfectly imperfect. Thirty years ago, I’d have been bothered by so much exposure, but the displays seemed utterly ordinary. I didn’t read anything provocative into anyone’s state of undress. Instead, it seemed to fit within a broader theme: be Proud, whoever and however you are. 

 

I’m sure they were there, but I can’t recall drag queens strutting around the grounds. What stood out for me were all the people comfortable in their own skin and in their own clothes which defied traditional gender role stylings. This may have been progressive, but I felt a little old-fashioned—in a good way—thinking about Marlo Thomas’s “Free to Be…You and Me” album and book of the early seventies. Surely she’d be aglow gazing at this crowd of people boldly expressing themselves without a worry…on this day, at least. 

 

As Evan and I stepped into The Armory to give my slathered-on layers of sunscreen a break from fending off the sun’s rays, we drank margaritas and people-watched anew. Seattle Center being a tourist attraction on any given day, I asked him, “What percentage of people walking through here just happened upon all this?”

 

“Five percent,” he posited. Maybe so. Maybe it was ten, but Ned and Shirley from Wichita turned away, deciding to watch an encore of the fishmongers at Pike Place Market. I can’t even look at those beautiful fish on display, pulled from a seabed, now relegated to a bed of crushed ice. To each his/her/their own.

 

Without the nudists traipsing through—perhaps there was a No Shoes, No Service sign on the door—I watched an impromptu parade of people shuffling toward restrooms and the Frappuccino line. I noticed the contented smile of an older man wearing a straw hat covered in rows of shimmering rainbow tiles. I checked out the nail polished fingers of so many people half my age. Boys? Nonbinary? Didn’t matter. I saw a six-foot-seven figure peer over everyone’s heads while donning a formless frock splattered with flourishes of rainbow tie-dye. More people free to be.

 

So many in the crowd were of college age and much younger. They didn’t show the shock I probably couldn’t hide during my first Pride more than three decades ago. They’ve grown with many of the same struggles and much of the same hate, but they’ve had plenty of outlets at school, on social media and on streaming channels to encourage them to explore all facets of who they are, to absorb the pervasive message that Love Is Love and to find their people. They appeared totally at ease here. Happy without having to edit their mannerisms, their attire, their ways of interacting. 

 

In all, I felt awe. It helped to be alongside Evan, who took in the surroundings and fed off what he too observed. I’ve passed on so many Prides since 1990. My weekend in Seattle reminded my why it still matters to others and, yes, by golly, to me as well.

 

So there it is. Happy Pride. Call it a wrap.

 

Now let me catch my breath before Round Two four weeks from now in Vancouver. Yes, okay, I’m Proud. But this introvert is worn out, too.