Back By Popular Demand

Every year when Gay Pride rolls into town, I make it to some parade somewhere. I believe I have been to parades from Wichita to Sheboygan to San Francisco and most parts in-between. It's usually the same routine.

We all know the drill: cat call at the go-go boys, give a shout-out to the drag queens, and keep an eye out for someone to take home apres-parade. My plan always goes to hell when the goddamned P-FLAG contingent strolls by beaming from ear-to-ear. I try to be in line at the porta-potties when I sense them coming. If I get caught on the curb, I'm a blubbering idiot by the time the second father strolls by with his bare-chested, nipple-clamped daughter dragging her bald girlfriend on a leash. That kind of love just turns me to mush. (The father's, not the other.)

Gay Pride is important to me. Our own legends invoke the harmonic convergence of Judy Garland's Funeral, the raid on The Stonewall Inn in New York, and my fifth birthday. It was my fifth birthday. So I have my very own very lavish bash courtesy of any city anywhere and most cities everywhere. Beyond my feelings of how important it is that we be seen and heard in our full spectrum of outrageousness, it's my birthday, dammit. I want a parade. And so I have a parade.

When I first relented and acknowledged that I was gay, I attended my first Pride Parade within 90 days. I also fulfilled the other three first-page requirements from the handbook:

I bought a Communards cassette tape.

I had my hair permed (just on the top).

And I made friends with a drag queen.

Between my fresh-faced pervert of a boyfriend and Ms. Ramona Baker, as she was known on the stage, my education was fast and complete. Jerry would drive in circles around a bar he wanted to patronize until I demonstrated that I could use "nelly", "butch", and "trick" in a sentence without betraying my gay youth. Ramona taught me that mascara can fill in the blank spots of a moustache. If you made me choose today, I'm not sure which of those was most valuable. The memories, at a minimum, are priceless.

Every year, as my birthday approaches, I think back on the people, places and things of my gay time on earth and remember with varying degrees of fondness some of the characters I have encountered. Many of them are dead. A lot of them are old. Some of them just got lost in the messy mixture of time and moving vans and storage units. All of them are alive and still talking over one another in the recesses of my memory - especially at this time of year. It's like Pride Day brings them all to life as a reminder of my provenance.

One night, after demonstrating my contextual knowledge of "bottom", "top" and "open relationship", Jerry and I went to dinner, dancing and a drag show for my birthday. My budding friendship with Ms. Ramona Baker got us very good seats and an after-show elbow-rubbing with the performers. We ended up bouncing from bar-to-bar with a contingent of men in women's underwear until we landed at Frisco.

At Frisco, we discovered that one of our contingent, Ms. Fritz Capone, had gone missing. Boys will be boys, even when they're being girls. So we assumed she had taken a shine to some fair lad and gone off to do whatever it is that girls who are boys do with boys. We continued to celebrate the occasion of my birth until the law required us to leave and the lights to be put out. We made our way home and were awakened the next morning at 6 a.m. by the phone ringing.

No one we knew would call at 6 a.m. unless there had been a death, so I jumped out of bed and answered the phone to hear Ms. Ramona Baker speed-talk me through the events of the previous night.

"Grrrrrrrrrl.....your face is gonna fall off when you hear what happened to Ms. Fritz Capone," she hissed.

"Is she dead?" I asked.

"Well....", Ramona could milk a story the way Sam Harris would squeeze every drop of life from Over The Rainbow in the old "Star Search" days. You would have to sit on your hands to keep from applauding as she rounded the final turn of a story.

(It is at this point that I want to disclaim any actual knowledge of the ensuing events on the slim chance that the central figure is still alive after decades of impressive alcohol consumption and all the other things that tend to happen to gay people to prevent us from hitting old age.)

As repeated down through the years, the story goes that Fritz had over-consumed at some establishment and escorted herself outside for fresh air and someplace nice to lie down. She settled on the hood of a Buick outside the local dinner theatre. The location of the dinner theatre always provided for interesting interaction between the well-heeled heterosexual sect of the city and the high-heeled homosexuals that patronized the adjoining bars. Fritz did two bars of "Now I lay me down to sleep..." and was discovered some time later by the well-heeled owners of the Buick who did not remember having left a portly woman to guard their hood ornament.

They reacted the way heterosexuals always react when they find a body on the hood of their car: They called the police. Before any straight people get their back up, you should know that this is not our first response. We would first roll the body over to ascertain how cute the body is and then decide whether to take it home and call the police or to call 911 on the spot. There is no dismissing the value of an official record of a cute man having been hauled out of your flat.

The police arrived at the scene of the Buick and did their dead-level, 3 a.m. best to feel a heartbeat from the lifeless form still balanced on the car's hood. Feeling no heartbeat through seven layers of undergarments, 2 layers of foam, 2 extra-large breasts of indeterminate material and enough sequins to cover The Louvre, they did what all policemen do when they think somebody might be dead: They called the coroner.

The coroner, having been trained to detect a pulse from various other sources or, mayhaps, having previously encountered a passed-out, pancaked He-Lady, quickly determined our beloved Fritz to be Not Dead But Drunk. She narrowly missed a trip to the morgue and wound up, instead, drying out among the lower, yet living, caste of society. Upon her waking, she reclaimed her wig from a hooker, her shoes from a pervert and made her phone call to be picked up and restored to her former glory.

And these are the things that make me proud every June. I have inherited the indomitable instinct to survive from queens who woke up in jail for all the right - and wrong - reasons. I have buried, married and carried my share of men from point-to-point in my years. The best and worst in each of them gives me cause to smile when I remember who and where I come from. I am a man with a culture worth celebrating.

Whether it's Langston Hughes, Harvey Milk or the Fritz Capones we've all known in our day, it's the smile or the wince upon remembering that infuses this time of year with the pride of affiliation. For better or for worse, I am not alone. I may be in Kansas, but I will never be alone so long as the voices of decades past come to life each June and cause me to giggle late at night when I'd rather be sleeping. It's mid-June and the parades are popping up all over. My birthday is right around the corner - 42 this year. And all of the old gang is back to have a drink and to tell the old, old stories. Even if it's only in my head, they're back.

Back by popular demand.