Pride MMVII.

As always: started off at the corner of Central and Girard.

As always: every article of clothing had specific layers of meaning paying tribute to generations of queers long dead. Red tie for the Vaudevillians. Arrow shirt for the openly gay fashion model they put in the pages of mainstream publications in the '20s, when such things were utterly unheard of. Farah slacks for where I came from: El Paso, which was economically devastated when the clothing factory shut down. Dressed totally in black except for the red tie with double white pinstripes at an angle, made by (who else?) Armani, which I bought (where else?) at a thrift store. Italian straw "boater" hat for my political involvement, and to give me the chance to exercise the complex and largely forgotten visual language of hat etiquette.

Almost no one "got it", but I got a lot of compliments. If there were any politically active, geriatric gay vaudevillians in the crowd, I obviously missed them; but a bunch of people complimented me in general terms. It was, of course, insanely hot.

I added one new item to my get-up: a recording kit, complete with "KUNM 89.9 FM" cube on the mic, just in case it got any camera time.

No TV camera time, like when I did the story on Sandia's air emissions. But people were snapping pictures of me all along the route. Yes, lots in which I just happened to be there, in the shot, but lots also where it was the camera aimed at *me*, and no one else. And then after the march, of course, lots of people saying "I saw you in the parade, you rule" and stuff like that. Makes me feel great.

The best part was that I got at least two dozen people applauding not me, but KUNM.

As always: I start out and Central and Girard, between the marchers and the counterprotestors with their bullhorns (and limited understanding of the bible -- in translation, naturally). Years ago -- but not *so* many years ago -- the marchers routinely got pelted with eggs by these counterprotestors, who seem these days to follow the teachings of a certain Rev. D.L. Moody. Now it's down to a moving battle of bullhorns and car horns and shouted insults no one hears and drag queens blowing kisses and young twinks wiggling and waggling their drop-dead gorgeous young asses (which I suspect might be the *real* reason the Moody people *do* this). Same bunch as last year, mostly. I like to stand there because I am an outsider, a marginal character, even to the local gay scenes, but also because this point of conflict is one of the oldest historical "constants" in this march.

If the counterprotestors disappeared, then the march would be totally stripped of its political and social meaning. I would lose interest and might not even bother to attend the dance tent and realtors'-and-insurance-brokers' show that takes over most of the fairgrounds. It would mean we *had* been accepted into mainstream society, and the *need* for the march would evaporate into thin air. We *depend* on this tension. We thrive on it.

We *exist* because in 1870, Westphal *invented* "the homosexual" as "a species". (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, V. I, p. 43) We're not "people". In Foucault's famous words on Wesstphal's article: "the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species." Since Westphal's "famous article" on "contrary sexual sensations", at least, we are considered a wholly separate species from homo sapiens. And "people" (homo sapiens, that is -- for which I read "breeders") *hate* us -- I guess 'cause we don't breed, even at the same time they'd hate to see us ever do so. By "hate" I mean that even while on biological grounds they object to us not breeding, they object all the more stridently when we pair up and adopt kids, much less raise 'em, still less have 'em by means contrived by man (e.g., artificial insemination). They're positively *terrified* of us. I honestly do not know why.

They hate us, still. Therefore, we march. If academia would -- or could -- "uninvent" homosexuality as easily as it *invented* it, *if* we had equal human rights under the law (e.g., to marry, or even to go to bars where our own kind congregate without being specially targeted by police), we wouldn't need to march. Period. We'd blend in, lead our lives, and eventually die, just like everyone else.

We're not there yet and I doubt we will be in my lifetime. Therefore, we march.

My deepest thanks, therefore, go out to these "street preacher" people for continuing to make these endeavours both *interesting* and *worthwhile*, when otherwise what we now call "Pride" has largely ceased to be a solemn commemoration of the Christopher Street Rebellion and has become an increasingly commercialised, scaled-down version of the State Fair. These street preacher people have a website: www.officialstreetpreachers.com, if you'd care to express your own gratitude to them in person. The bearded gentleman behind the sign saying "GOD ABHORS YOU" on the main page was, of course, present. (He's rather sexy, really, in a bearded biker chub sort of way. I'm guessing he's a "total sub bottom".) Other signs read "HOMO SEX IS A THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY" and of course "HOMO SEX IS SIN". No signs saying "GOD HATES FAGS" this time around -- I think maybe those have gotten a bad rap, but who can say.

I thought of interviewing one or two of them, but decided not to -- they got their stuff recorded *very* amply. (Though they would be well advised to take a sound engineer into their ranks. They had some *serious* feedback problems.) If I use any of their sounds, I may use the one (assuming I can find it) of them saying (roughly) "you like New Mexico because you heard about the aliens and came out here to get their anal probes". They really said that, and I have the tape to prove it.

But that's not what's interesting about them. What they say in the heat of the moment is least interesting of all. What's *really* interesting is what they say when they have time to think about it, and measure their words. That's when their underlying logic comes into display.

At times, it's hard to imagine these guys are serious, and aren't just having their own kind of fun being out there, but it would be foolhardy to impute motivation to them. Their dependable presence absolutely *is* their own unique form of "camp". Just like Nazi propaganda art was often *intensely* homoerotic at the same time they were rounding us up for extermination, there may be more than a touch of self-loathing in what they do. They obviously enjoy going around the country and looking at faggots, even if the only way they can justify doing so morally is to preach the word of God (as they understand it) to the faggots.

No mere doorman at Foxes gets that many booties shook in his face, that's for sure.

Come to think of it, they probably get to see more fags than I do, living here, and just going to this one march every year. Hmm. Maybe it's time I got a calling. A booty calling.

But in their own terms, what follows comes from the front page of their website. This screed comes from the pen (or more likely, the keyboard) of one Mr. Ruben Israel:

. . . when you have a bunch of girly men abusing, polluting and corrupting themselves with each other in sexually perverted ways, compounding and exacerbating their wickedness with the consumption of alcohol and a wide variety of mind altering drugs, that they inevitably ALTER their own brain chemistry by their sinful behavior! Their brain chemistry changes as they continue in SIN. Their neural pathways mutate resulting in a reverse polarization of those pathways and then they no longer desire God's gift to them...a.k.a WOMEN!

Mr. Israel denotes this condition as "Gay Related Neural Pathway Disorder" (GRNPD). I can not help but wonder as to Mr. Israel's background in neuropathology. Perhaps he is, in fact, a highly respected brain surgeon. I honestly don't know. What specific neural pathways, transmitters, and receptors are involved in this "disorder"? I honestly don't know, and can't pretend to. I am *extremely* ignorant. (I just know how to dress.) But it is surely nothing new to hear moral invective cloaked in broadly pseudoscientific terms. After all, if a man's nose has certain proportions, then he they *must* be a Jew, or at least a mischling, even if he's not circumcised -- right? Right. (It isn't *all* about the cock, you know.)

Line up the cattle cars, folks.

This particular line of reasoning, if "reasoning" it can be called, is, well, at least a little interesting. See, I was Gay *long* before I started deliberately altering my brain chemistry, and would even go so far as to assert that my doing so was largely an attempt to deal with the socially proscripted desires I had which lots of religious people just didn't "get" and absolutely wouldn't tolerate, let alone accept.

As to whether sexuality exists in a strictly binaristic, hierarchical "polar" opposition, let's just say I have my doubts, as they might too, if they ever cruised craigslist and saw *hundreds* of otherwise "happily" married "straight" men "curious" about their own kind, or God help us all, the infinite variety of transsexuals at Foxes (and elsewhere). I continue:

Instead of a using the plumbing that God gave them for its NATURAL and OBVIOUS end-use application (to please a wife and produce a NATURAL FAMILY) they employ the use of their God given plumbing for EVIL and WICKED end-use purposes! They corrupt not only their minds but their bodies as well!

So the greatest of all of God's creations (from a creationist's point of view, the one creation of which God said, ". . . let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." -- Gen. 1:26) is nothing but a matter of "plumbing".

This strikes me not as laughable so much as *deeply* presumptuous. According to the way they seem to see things, God might have done better to have placed dominion over the rest of creation in the hands of a mechanical clock, as in a system devised to carry water by no more than gravity, pressure, and flow. They do not *question* God, they *challenge* him, by saying that God's greatest creation, made in God's own image, and after God's own likeness, is no more than a system -- and a crude one, at that -- plumbing -- which *mankind* has devised for his own convenience.

This strikes me as a peculiarly (and crudely) Cartesian point of view for those who outwardly eschew science and the scientific method in favour of the "miracle" of "creation". I would personally imagine that the human body, and within the human body, the human mind, wherein sexual desire is conceived, are among the greatest miracles God has ever made. But no. They claim to know all about God's greatest creation, moreso even than its creator, and to relegate its most complex and least understood workings to a matter of "plumbing".

At the same time, they choose their translations selectively. Quoting the King James Version of the bible earlier in the page, they claim their mandate to protest Stonewalll marches comes from II Tim. 4:2, which they say reads:

…….GO…….GO……. CHARGE…….RUN……..RUSH THE ENEMY…….CONFRONT THE DARKNESS WITH LIGHT…….ATTACK GOD’S FOE WITH BOLDNESS AND TRUTH

Sound just a teensy-weensy bit Jihadist?

Leaving aside which (unspecified) translation of the bible contains ALL CAPS and so many grossly ungrammatical ellipses -- my Authorized King James version says II Timothy 4:2 reads:

Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.

Call me ignorant, but I fail to see how misquoting the inerrant work of God constitues either a reprobation, a rebuke, or an exhortation.

If what they say is true, given when Genesis was written, and assuming Genesis to be the one true and inerrant word of God, God is no more than an acequia -- an irrigation ditch.

Some people might call that "blasphemy".

Are these fellows Christians adhering to the concept of biblical inerrancy, or are they scientists? I can not help but doubt they're fully either. They have their ideas, and that is that, and they won't change their minds, regardless what arguments might be made from either perspective. When they want to say that God is the Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omnipresent Creator of the Universe, they do so. That's their right, and I applaud them for going out into the streets to preach what they take to be truth to those they take to be apostates.

But when they want to reduce God to the status of an irrigation ditch, a crude contrivance made for man's convenience in cooperation with the laws of physics, just to prove that homosexuals aren't people, they do that too. Strikes me as a trifle opportunistic. There's a word for that. I think -- correct me if I'm wrong, please -- it is "bullshit".

Just like last year, there was a loooooong stretch around San Mateo where I *was* the whole parade. It seems to get "split" there -- I think the cops do that to let the traffic keep flowing. Like last year, that's when I got some small taste what it was like 31 years ago. Just little old me out there, completely vulnerable, and hoping to entertain bystanders before they turned against me.

Got two good interviews I will use for a story to air Monday. Not what I'd hoped for but it will work. Talked a good 20 minutes or so with Don Shraeder inside the Archives exhibit. And maybe three or four with P.J. Sedillo, who has, say whatever else you like of him, put together the archives in the first place, and keeps expanding them. It's a little "thinner" than I wanted for an airable story, but it beats what I could have gotten in one tenth of the time, which would otherwise "do".