It's just not fun anymore. The parade used to be a fabulous, exciting, heart rendering event - with several hundred thousand people lining lower Westheimer, screaming their hearts out.
Now, it's 1/3 churches, 1/8 lesbian service organizations, 1/4 multi-national corporations, three bars (all owned by Charles Armstrong) and BCBC. Churches? Churches that promise to be inclusive, and that Jesus will take us in? The same church organizations that are fighting against gay marriage, and fighting against gay people being seen as anything other than behavorial choice?
A bunch of people marching with signs for Jesus and overtaxed, underpowered audio systems playing Christian rock is NOT what I associate with gay pride.
Charles Armstrong, who is the Lord and Master of all Gay Commerce in the City of Houston now puts his usual five bucks into gay pride, and we have a token appearance for the six gay bars he now owns. He probably docked his employee's pay to create the float, or made them work on it on their own time or something.
I remember when there were entries for every significant gay business; bars had elaborate floats built on fire trucks or construction equipment, there were all-gay amateur marching bands, the Dallas gay cheerleaders, fifty-four thin, moustached men in leather chaps, leather vests, leather boots and leather caps, each carrying a flag of the fifty states, one carrying the flag of the United States, one carrying that of the City of Houston, one carrying the rainbow flag, and one the flag of Mary's, the oldest gay bar in Texas. People were exuberant.
Now, it's just the young lesbians who are. It's gotten to be a contest for "look at how accepting we really are."
The truth is different. The truth is that the prejudice has become somehwat unfashionable. It's still there. It still operates. Show me an openly gay upper level member of management in a Fortune 100 company. Show me an openly gay partner in a big five accounting firm. Or in a major law firm. Show me the CEO of a major multi-national company whose partner at a party is a man with whom he's shared his last thirty years.
It doesn't exist. It likely won't exist. Just as women continue to beat their heads against the glass ceiling, and black people are welcome just SO high and no higher, we are only allowed to achieve the maximum in businesses that we own. There are several, some very successful.
Yet, we will likely never measure up to the standards of Oprah or Mary Kay Ash. Most of our gay business leaders are still focused on the party, and focused on the youngest man they can still coax out of his very fashionable drawers. They are vicious snubs of other gay businesses, unless they think that they can get "it" or get it for free.
There is no bigotry like that with which the gay community assaults itself. Being old is cause for excommunication. Being fat is worse. Being effiminate even worse than that. The gay ideal is a clone army of thin young men in low-rise, $150 jeans, wearing an earth toned, distressed t-shirt with "Abercrombie & Fitch" emblazoned across their gym toned chest. Everthing is geared to speak to that image. There are no businesses that cater to an older crowd, except as to allow those older persons to try to pick up on the young ones that look just like .. the ideal. All right, there are a FEW businesses that are free of THAT much single-mindedness, but I defy you to find some gay business owner who actively seeks out other gay businesses to supply their needs.
So, rather than be regaled with zealots telling me that Jesus will welcome me into their worship services, or watch Countrywide Home Loans' float lionize having squeezed out all of the independant gay mortgage brokers, or Wells Fargo pretend to be accepting of homosexuality, or Bill White act like gay people mean a rat's ass, I stayed home, and reflected on a time when half-naked go-go boys dressed as fire fighters, grinned madly at the crowd from the top of their rented fire truck, instead of suffering through the intense discomfort of the Fire Chief and those few firefighters who could be compelled to ride behind the closed doors and windows of their COH fire engine.
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