Chicago Pride
Near the end of my first year of law school, I started dating someone who hadn’t had to endure the minutia of my father’s life and my efforts to reconcile it with mine. Dan just knew my dad was gay, and I left it at that.
A couple of months after we started dating, we planned our first weekend-long date. We saw some bands play, ate a burrito and biked to his apartment. The next morning, we had coffee in his quiet apartment filled with comic books and light. We headed out for brunch and then hit Reckless Records and Quimby’s Bookstore. It was a perfect Sunday in Chicago.
The day warmed up and clouded over. We biked to a barbecue where we would both know some people. We showed off being a couple. After a few beers, there still wasn’t any food being cooked, so we got back on our bikes and headed over to Lakeview to see the Gay Pride Parade. Dan knew a guy throwing a party on the parade route. He’d be able to show me how cool he was with gay people and maybe we’d get something to eat.
Streets near the parade were mobbed with people, and we had to walk our bikes. I was hot, sticky, hungry and hating the crowds. The party was well underway when we arrived, and most people were already drunk. Drunk enough that no one thought to start the grill at this party, either. Dan and I put our bikes in the living room and grabbed beers, following most of the other party-goers back out to the street to watch the parade.
Dan chatted with his friends while I masked the social exclusion I felt by pretending to eagerly scan the crowd. For what, I don’t know. I wasn’t likely to recognize anyone I knew. My friends weren’t much into large, corporate-sponsored festivals in yuppie neighborhoods and most of them were at that hipster barbecue we had just left.
The parade itself passed by. Gay and Lesbian Irish people in green T-shirts and tam o’shanters. A trans Carnival-style dance troupe with elaborate costumes. The headpieces must have been a nightmare in that heat. Here were the gay and lesbian AT&T employees, all wearing AT&T t-shirts and khakis and waving rainbow flags with the AT&T logo on it. I felt miserable for the gay rights movement to have come so far just for the pay-off of matching T-shirts.
While the parade itself felt whitewashed and sanitary, the sidewalks and crowd around it were crackling with energy and alcohol and a frantic search for sex. It was Sunday afternoon, the last chance of the weekend to hook up, and people seemed hell-bent on making it…
