This is the second installment in my report from Pride 2022. You can read the first, about my reluctance to go and my eagerness to be convinced, here.
First of all, we missed the parade. Like K said, make it 9:45. I’m pretty sure it started at 8, but hey, at least we looked fucking c*nt.
K had a slight crop top paired with flowy, summer linens. J was wearing drag merch and J2 was wearing an outfit reminiscent of the early 2000s Taco Bell aesthetic. And I, in lil shorts and heavy docs. To put it simply, we were a boy band.
We made it to the festival—the first in two years—held at the community college. I knew I was in the right place when I saw a penis shaped pillow making an ahegao face. Great! A gift for my best friend’s birthday that night. I love fulfilling a side quest’s requirements before I’ve even begun the quest.
The festival was, at first glance, a pretty standard affair. People were there, but not too many, and there were vendors and games and giveaways. There was an unseasonable wind that made the heat more than tolerable if you were in the shade.
I saw leagues and leagues of empty tables with a canopy of rainbow umbrellas. And of course there was rainbow everything, rainbow pins, rainbow flags, trans pride flags, t-shirts, pins, etc. I had the immediate thought that this was kind of boring and lame.
I mean, it was great to be able to buy merch, but I didn’t think we could call that an event all on its own. I had to leave the festival briefly to get something from our car (and deposit Penis-kun, my newly purchased phallic pillow) and when I returned things had already changed.
The attendance had tripled and the music was playing and the drag was performing and the beer garden was set up. I saw two heavy boys in harnesses walking around, I saw a play pen for the pups, I saw a kid dressed as the Akatsuki from Naruto, and I saw a young man with a mullet and fishnets and tats with a girl just as alt as he was. Drag queens did hovered about doing crowd work and the food trucks were serving.
My feet hurt, so my friends and I sat down at one of the tables when it became available. I remember gazing out into that canopy of rainbows, feeling the wind in my hair, seeing everyone having fun. Across the way a boy with his button down shirt all the way open and his pearls shining was dancing with his friends. At our own table, an off-duty drag queen and what I can only describe as an Adonis-lite model were coming and going, both mutual friends of J2.
X, a good girlfriend of mine, showed up looking like a goth and a clown and handed me her PetSmart leash attached to her Hustler Hollywood fetish collar. Her boyfriend joined us soon after. My roommate came and met my queer friends for the first time.
And for a moment, I forgot. Texas’ bid to criminalize gender affirming healthcare and the parents who listen to their doctors. The sports bans. The military ban. The looming specter of the Supreme Court’s conservative super majority. I forgot all of it.
I was talking to queer boys and it wasn’t on an app across tiles and tiles of pecs and butts. I told them they were gorgeous and they told me we were gorgeous—an exchange so nice and friendly and affirming and totally impossible in online spaces where dialogues are normally “wyd” or “pics?”
And yeah there were harnesses and yeah there were fetishists and there were drag queens and there were trans people and gay boys in mesh and lesbians and frolicking allies and sure, families, and sure a T-Mobile pop-up shop. And there was a smile on my face and ease in my heart.
There is simply an old fashioned comfort that comes with seeing signals of safety. To move from a hostile or indifferent straight world into a deeply, homosexual world of pretty colors and pearls and bare chests. To leave the digital world behind—nothing but discourse and bad news—for a physical one, where the evidence of queer acceptance and solidarity is right in front of you…there is nothing more beautiful.