In Praise of Pride Merch, Part One

It seems like olden times—in 1993, the summer after I graduated high school, my that-summer best friend Brett gave me his set of Freedom Rings. Just the six rainbow colors back then, rings a little less than an inch big on a cheap hardware-store-like chain. They felt like the most beautiful thing in the world to me. They were like the key to some grownup gay world I couldn’t quite picture.

A few weeks before that, I’d gone to one rock show (King Missile at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park) with a pink triangle drawn on my hand in lipstick. I wanted people to know I was bi, I wanted to meet girls if I could, but I didn’t have any visual language for it. Although, I guess my goth-punk style maybe was a little bi in retrospect?

Nobody I talked to at the show knew what I meant with the lipstick triangle, it felt like a clumsy misstep. But with those Freedom Rings, I felt like an instant ROCK STAR wherever I went, whether they translated to anyone else or not. I felt like a goddess like I was dialed into something much bigger than myself, but also dialed INTO myself. They were a swaggery Dumbo-feather that helped me stomp/tiptoe my way into my adult queer life. (Even if that summer paired me up with a boyfriend who reminded me of Eddie Vedder. Shrug emoji? That’s bi, I guess!)

Anyway, one piece of jewelry helped me claim something important about my eighteen-year-old self.

Now, I have thirty years of pride tchotchkes and as many decades of rainbow art, queer poetry, and a jillion paragraphs examining all manner of multi-gender affections, and an ex-wife for a best friend.

Once, during the pandemic, I typed “bi socks” into the internet and had them in two days, delivered to the front-neighbor’s door, but still!

Last year, a friend of mine designed one of the pride Skittles bags, and Amy and I looked for them everywhere we went. In a grocery store in the middle of red rural Upstate New York, we found them! Then, out in the parking lot, a stranger noticed the rainbow sticker on Amy’s car and came over to do some gay bonding. She mentioned that she didn’t have much support around there. You could tell that running into us meant something to her.

On the way to my nephew's birthday, randomly stopping for snacks, and there we were: ORGANIZING.