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Choose Love
Jul. 1st, 2004 06:20 pmWell, hotmail is being useless. Can't log on. Odds are, it's another hack attack, given how much Attack! On! The! Internet! seems to be the hot new thing. So I'm twiddling around with writing, reading smut, trying not to listen too hard too a next-door neighbor screaming nonstop in Chinese - apparently an argument with only one participant, since she's the only voice I can hear, and this has been going on for half and hour - not much else to report right now other than this little anecdote.
The San Francisco Pride Parade (it has some unweildy title involving gay, lesbian, transgender, yadda yadda, which I can't remember - suffice to say, it's an Alt-Lifestyle Pride Celebration) was last Sunday. Toys and I went. We stood near the corner of Market and Grant, opposite the new Four Seasons hotel tower where, when the gap between entries in the parade got too long, we could ogle hotel guests who were watching the parade from the windows of their suites. (Although I have to say, given the venue, they were a disappointingly chaste crowd of onlookers - after some early promising gropage on one balcony, the whole viewpoint grew increasingly G-rated. Yawn.) Woe for the days of scantily clad leathermen, which this year seemed in rather short supply.
Instead, this year's Pride Parade was pretty much completely dedicated not to the party mentality of previous years (nor to the political activism of the late '80s, when I first moved to the city), but to theme of gay marriage - the bulk of the marchers were charmingly square, flaunting marriage licenses and waving banners to the tune of "35 years together and married 2 months!" And all this thanks to our current Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had the guts to buck the national trend by going ahead and authorizing official marriage licenses in the City until our Gov. Schwa-chan put the stopper on the whole deal. Now pending further court decisions.
On a side note, Toys and I were married in the same civil ceremony enjoyed by the people marching in that parade. Not at the grand City Hall, unfortunately, but at its annex while the dome was being restored and reconstructed, but in spirit, yes. This makes me proud.
So anyway, it almost goes without saying that Mayor Newsom is something of a celebrity here, which leads to the anecdote. In front of us were an assemblage of middle-aged gay fellows dressed in short-sleeve shirts and ball caps, chugging bottles of beer, very much the sorts of men who anywhere else would be talking about sports (and probably were, once the parade was over). When Mayor Newsom's convertible appeared in the parade, they struggled to position their digital cameras. "Is he ever coiffed!" someone in front of us said. "He looks like that in real life!" Sure enough, our Honorable Mayor has a stylishly spiky do, and was nattily dressed in a tan suit. He bears a faint resemblance, I thought, to Billy Baldwin. "Get a picture of his ass!" said one of the gay sports fans with a laugh, as he stopped the car and climbed out, facing away from us to shake hands with parade-side viewers.
"Only in San Francisco," as Herb Caen might have said. But the ass-ogling probably would have happened elsewhere too.
The San Francisco Pride Parade (it has some unweildy title involving gay, lesbian, transgender, yadda yadda, which I can't remember - suffice to say, it's an Alt-Lifestyle Pride Celebration) was last Sunday. Toys and I went. We stood near the corner of Market and Grant, opposite the new Four Seasons hotel tower where, when the gap between entries in the parade got too long, we could ogle hotel guests who were watching the parade from the windows of their suites. (Although I have to say, given the venue, they were a disappointingly chaste crowd of onlookers - after some early promising gropage on one balcony, the whole viewpoint grew increasingly G-rated. Yawn.) Woe for the days of scantily clad leathermen, which this year seemed in rather short supply.
Instead, this year's Pride Parade was pretty much completely dedicated not to the party mentality of previous years (nor to the political activism of the late '80s, when I first moved to the city), but to theme of gay marriage - the bulk of the marchers were charmingly square, flaunting marriage licenses and waving banners to the tune of "35 years together and married 2 months!" And all this thanks to our current Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had the guts to buck the national trend by going ahead and authorizing official marriage licenses in the City until our Gov. Schwa-chan put the stopper on the whole deal. Now pending further court decisions.
On a side note, Toys and I were married in the same civil ceremony enjoyed by the people marching in that parade. Not at the grand City Hall, unfortunately, but at its annex while the dome was being restored and reconstructed, but in spirit, yes. This makes me proud.
So anyway, it almost goes without saying that Mayor Newsom is something of a celebrity here, which leads to the anecdote. In front of us were an assemblage of middle-aged gay fellows dressed in short-sleeve shirts and ball caps, chugging bottles of beer, very much the sorts of men who anywhere else would be talking about sports (and probably were, once the parade was over). When Mayor Newsom's convertible appeared in the parade, they struggled to position their digital cameras. "Is he ever coiffed!" someone in front of us said. "He looks like that in real life!" Sure enough, our Honorable Mayor has a stylishly spiky do, and was nattily dressed in a tan suit. He bears a faint resemblance, I thought, to Billy Baldwin. "Get a picture of his ass!" said one of the gay sports fans with a laugh, as he stopped the car and climbed out, facing away from us to shake hands with parade-side viewers.
"Only in San Francisco," as Herb Caen might have said. But the ass-ogling probably would have happened elsewhere too.