In Praise of Pride Merch, Part Two

Loss is, but so is LOVE.

This year, for the first time since burning-things-down summer, Amy and I joined the Philly Pride March. People of all ages were wrapped in every color of Pride flags, every sequined or tulle (or both!) permutation of every flavor of rainbow. So many young people with cute pansexual flags painted on their cheeks. Everyone there (aside from the requisite small group of surly religious folks) seemed so happy, so free, and SO STINKIN’ CUTE!

And there, at the end of the march, were the booths. My favorites were the independent artists. They were selling in-joke t-shirts, pronoun pins, big, bright PLUS SIZE! dresses. One booth had a flag pin selection so thorough that they had both the old and new versions of the polyamory flag.

And of course, there were organizations: for reproductive justice, for gender-affirming care, for getting out the vote. The National Parks Service was there making a flag out of rainbow “what inclusion means to me” postcards.

As I’m describing this day I kind of took for granted, it’s really hitting home how much history and effort and sacrifice had to happen to get us there. Just like those Freedom Rings were a key to a bigger life, Pride is a rebirth, reaffirmation, and continuous organizing of that bigger life. It feeds us and connect us and fills our field of vision with bright adorableness so we can be fortified to keep building a loving world.

There were corporations at Philly Pride too, banished to something called “corporate alley.” I love that for us.

But about those corporations: I am so, SO happy that my niece came of age in a time where her bisexuality was so ordinary that she could shop about it in the Target. I love that she could be like “Oh there’s a Star Trek themed Pride shirt this year and now I have a Star Trek themed Pride shirt.”

I love that I could super casually pick up a bi bandana to use as an in-case-there’s-teargas-and-also-because-Covid mask in the summer of 2020! Plus glittery rainbow socks.

When I see the Pride sections in regular stores, I always wonder what it would have felt like to see them as a kid. I was raised rurally and then sheltered-suburbanly in the Eighties and Nineties. For queerness, I pretty much had Madonna (whose records my mom let me get) and Culture Club (whose records she did not.) When I grew into hair bands, I had pretty, pretty Sebastian Bach on my wall making me feel gender things I didn’t have words for.

Would a beautiful activist Skittles package or a rack of multi-flagged tees have given me a language for what I was feeling? Maybe! Who knows! I didn’t even have a language for talking about “regular” sexuality, let alone for discussing queerness.

Which is why it really, really hurts my heart that violent, cruel monsters bullied Target into taking their Pride displays down. It feels like an end (hopefully just a temporary end) of a golden age. It’s not that I think corporations genuinely cared about us this past decade or so—it doesn’t make a difference to me how they feel, only that they’re adding more rainbows (And therefore, I think, more queer visibility) to the world. We really, really need all the rainbows we can get.

I value Corporate Pride not so much as a part of activism as a bellweather, as a symbol that we were powerful enough to be a mainstream thing, marketed to like everybody else. Selling us stuff is not an act of altruism, but it lets us see our progress nonetheless. It lets us see ourselves.

I know the tyranny of disinformation, violence, and fucked up “anti-woke” initiatives won’t prevail in the long run, but for now I just want to stop and feel the pain of losing a little ground. Pride is much bigger than cruelty, stupidity, white supremacy, much bigger and more powerful than brute force. It’s love, y’all, and there’s absolutely nothing they can do to overcome love.

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.

Poetic License Horoscope June 29-July 5

Cancer: As Pete and Frank sing on 30 Rock, “It’s never too late for now.” Still wishing you’d started a quarantine hobby? Go ahead! Need to re-fall in love with the One that Got Away and get all Sliding Doors-y? Why not, as long as you have your unfollow button handy! We all need muses. Even if your Shiny New Thing is extreme napping, go for it with your entire heart! It’s not like we can go to the movies. (I mean, we can, but there’s that whole not-wanting-to-die thing.)

Leo: No matter WHAT claustrophobia or commentary comes your way, the stars think you’re doing GREAT! How can a person with an entire apron collection possibly do any wrong?! Your family is well-loved, if not always well-slept. There’s sunshine coming in all the windows all the time. I assume your ceiling fans have been installed against the insidious humidity. If you can, fix up a gentle drink and go read outside for a while. Or just look at leaves and listen for birdsong. Do yourself one favor after another. You’ve been doing a WONDERFUL job.

Virgo: The stars keep dreaming roadtrips home from California, even though we’ve been gone for sixteen years. We know what it means. Random visitors keep joining the trip—a problematic aunt, a student and her family, a dear former massage therapist who once came with us on a hunt for fairy houses. The dreams are like The Muppet Movie in reverse—retracing our steps, dropping off friends, forgetting to say goodbye. It’s okay, other adventures await you. For now, rest and write.

Libra: “We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers. Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable.”—Bayard Rustin. Listen to the unsung king who planned the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom! Fly in the way of every racism you see. Carry every policeman (literal and metaphorical) away into the clouds. Sing and scream glitter and blessings at every pedestal until all the bad statues are in the sea where Aquaman can punch them.

Scorpio: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”—Angela Davis in 2014. You don’t have to steal vibranium artifacts from museums, but you can if you want to! Whatever is glowing around the purple edges of possibility, smash the glass and take it. The stars have been told by therapists that we have to work on our locus of control, but it really is up to every one of us to reorder the world and make it glowing, make it just.

Sagittarius: We’ve been too sheepish to Google it yet, but the stars are in the market for a beautiful fly swatter in rose gold. This is because we are tired of taking off a shoe every time we see a spotted lanterfly nymph getting ready to eat the garden. What beautiful and absolute solution can you find to an invasive, ravenous annoyance? How can you decorate unpleasant necessity?

Capricorn: There are lots of different theories about the too-many-fireworks-lately. It’s even been suggested that they’re provided by the government and meant to deprive activists of sleep! Maybe! More likely, fireworks are fun and sparkly, a loud and mostly safe release. Either way, either way, don’t call the police! Find a way to gaze up in wonder, even now that the the surge and spark is commonplace. You’re alive, after all, if you’re reading this! I hope you’re reading this!

Aquarius:  THE STARS WANT TO SEE MORE PICTURES OF YOUR QUARANTINE OUTFITS!  We CANNOT get enough of fancy-for-no-reason or of pajamas outside! Go for both at once, why not?! We’re a little freakish and ghoulish for enjoying this magical moment in fashion history, but nonetheless: You are soft, sweet, ruffled, and comfy, trimmed with tiny bows. You never, ever have to wear shows that hurt. Sure, get wistful for eye makeup and showing your whole face, but make up for it in mask style and Zoom glamour. This is a time, as all times should be, of making beautiful room for ourselves.

Pisces: Season Two of Homecoming stars Janelle Monáe! Who would you be if you woke up on a boat having forgotten your own name? What friends would you make to save you or be saved? What hotel-key spoilers? What surprising reveals. Check your “Previously ons” and see what might be next!

Aries: Maybe, I hope, things have calmed down enough in your heart and mind that you might be able to catch up on Welcome to Night Vale! (Remember how chilling it was in that one episode when the sirens had stopped?) Listen to Cecil calm and gaslight, spin suspicion into peace.  Find out and follow the proverb of the day. Listen on the way home from the beach where DEFINTELY not enough people wear masks or just while you’re home folding your mask collection into neat little Marie Kondo tubes. Sometimes there’s order, even just in a story that rings in your ears.

Taurus: This week, the stars returned to Longwood Gardens, wearing a dress that made it look like we should be hitting on Duckie at the prom. (Though you know we’re a Blaine girl…) There were so, so many new flowers, new angles, new light—it was like guided meditation in a dream. In the waterlily garden, a blue dragonfly had alit on nearly every lily’s metal nameplate. Find something that steady, that sustaining, and rest.

Gemini: OMG the Hamilton movie comes out on Friday!!! We’ll be watching with my sister’s family who live five and a half hours away, linked by a group text and five years of car-singing. Y’all! We will get to watch David Diggs play Lafayette AND Jefferson, at least one of whose statues should be taken down and thrown into the sea. Remember “Tomorrow, there’ll be more of us.” At the March for Our Lives? Remember “Love is love is love is love’? In a hundred years if there’s still an America, it will be 80 percent because of Hamilton. It’s better than we deserve.

May Checkmarks, Rainbowy June Goals