[Medusa]

Jack and I stepped out to Pride in Conway today. It's the same town that I spoke about in the first post where, 9 years ago, I rode as the Parade Princess in Conway's first ever Pride event.

Some things remain the same even after 9 years.

John and Robert, the super flamboyant Gay couple who are now in their 70's, are still wearing their signature white tuxedos which pick up a little more adornment every year. The first year they were just white.
Nine years later, the cuffs of their shorts and sleeves of their coats are affixed with rainbow trim and there are dozens of rainbow stars rising across their backs. They remind us every year that Robert was a Vietnam Vet and fought for rights that we still don't have and John was at Stonewall, raising Gay hell.

There are still dozens of beautiful gay boys in all manner of shaved bodies wearing skimpy little shorts, speedos, thongs, and leather chest harnesses. They have slight noses and the boyish chests of men who have never done manual labor. They dance with pure joy and don't give a fuck who is watching - their energy infectious and arousing.

Mean old Dykes stand around and gruffly eyeball one another, daring you to approach with their downturned mouths and begging you for a kind word with their eyes. They wear starched-stiff wranglers, cowboy hats, ballcaps, t-shirts with ironic vagina-related sayings, and cargo shorts.

There are babies and dogs. Rainbow flags, rainbow umbrellas, rainbow everything covering every square inch of the town square.

Yes, I said town square. Because John and Robert aren't having any of that whispering bullshit where we do our Pride event out in a field somewhere, hidden from the judging eyes of old ladies fresh from church. No, they get a parade permit every year for a Sunday and march a steaming line of faggotry right down the middle of Main Street in Conway and end the parade on the fucking town square where techno music blasts and vendors have adorned their tents with gay fuckery that twirls and dazzles in the wind.

Every year, dozens of Queens brave the makeup-melting heat in spandex and corsets, huge flapping black eyelashes, and wigs jacked to Jesus to twirl and pump their way into the pocketbooks of the adoring crowd. Dollar bills fly while those giant sisters point and sashay, dip and pop, and grind their asses off to Lady Gaga, Pink, and Donna Summer.

I can always count on at least one performance bringing me to tears and this year it was a giant Drag Momma in an orange spandex dress with the kind of old-school training that dictated that her drawn-on eyebrows almost sat on the back of her head while her lips mouthed words in a red lipstick line the size of Ohio.

It takes a lot these days for a drag Momma to give me pause because I come from the land of Miss Gay America and I have seen the best there is but this woman, Britteny Paige, stomped the stage for her first act and then the music trailed off into a whisper. We all thought the act was over but could hear the stirrings of a timid guitar humming out the first few notes of "Man in the Mirror".
An acoustic background reminder from Britteny that it takes a lot for a man to put on a dress and heels in public.
I was moved.

Every year I tell myself that I won't cry and every year I feel sheepish when I feel the tears rolling down my cheek when some little skinny gayboy gyrates on stage to "Born This Way". Every year I look around at the babies and the dogs and my heart swells with the bigness of our family. Every year I am thankful beyond anything I know that I can be there to see it all and feel the energy of all of the hands that have paved the road before us so that we can be standing there in our ridiculous costumes in small-town Arkansas, mostly without fear.

Don't get me wrong, I had one moment where I was sitting on a bench with my back to the street and when I went to look over my shoulder, there was a large black truck rolling silently by with dark-tinted windows. For a split second I made a contingency plan to hit the ground if someone were to put a shotgun through the slightly-cracked window.

Because those are the kind of things you think about when you go to Pride events in small towns.

Still, the other thing you think about is that not one. single. protester. showed up this year.

Not one.

Every year for the last 10 years there have been groups of protesters sometimes holding megaphones and quoting the Bible, sometimes holding signs. One year some of Fred Phelps crew showed up but John and Robert hiked up their white shorts and ran them off.

This year it was just us. Just the fags and dykes, the bisexual folks, the Trans folks, the weird Queers, the tomboys, the straight people who came out to show support.

It was just us in all of our fuckery, our finery, and our glittering Gayness.

And me, sitting on a backless bench holding hands with my beloved, thanking the universe for being a part of it all.