Contrarian: Leave the Leather Bike Shorts at Home

I WENT TO my first gay pride parade in 1995. Having been “out” for just about a year, I was suitably excited to feel a part of something, to be celebrating our sense of “unity and community,” as one piece of literature declared. I bought a t-shirt that showed a band of soldiers who looked like they were in a Sgt. Rock comic, each of whom had a pink triangle on his helmet. Just to make sure I could get as gay as possible, I bought a black-string choker to match.

It was the last Sunday in June, and by the time my friends and I settled on a spot from which to watch the festivities, half the guys around us had their shirts off. Which seemed to be in keeping with the theme of the whole parade, I discovered, as float after float of bumping, grinding Abercrombie-looking men wearing G-strings or leather bike shorts rolled by, some openly simulating sex as the spectators hooted and catcalled. There were other contingents interspersed — an exotic zoo of lesbian bikers, drag queens with names like Hedda Lettuce and Patty O’Furniture, the occasional political candidate, smiling stiffly and trying not to show his terror — but it was the men who dominated. It was like a two-hour Playgirl photo shoot without the money shots.

I stood there slightly stunned, but also energized that all of this forbidden, salacious material was not only out in public, but out and proud, celebrated and venerated.

Then my friend Dave sidled up next to me. Dave works as a financial planner in New Jersey, and though he then had a new boyfriend, he wasn’t out at work — and had made it perfectly clear that he never intended to be. The world of finance, he said, was simply too homophobic, too old-boy-network, to accept an openly gay man in its midst. So he kept his mouth shut, invented the occasional phantom girlfriend for watercooler purposes, and went to gay bars and a pride fest now and then to let his hair down.

“Isn’t this amazing?” I asked him.

“Not really,” he said, arms folded across his chest. I was going to ask him why when a group from PFLAG — Parents, Families  and Friends of Lesbians and Gays — ­rounded the corner. One of the women holding the banner was in her mid-60s; it was a minute or two before we realized she was my friend Andy’s mom. Andy leapt into the street and hugged her, and as we all choked up, Dave’s offhand comment seemed all the more puzzling. Most of our mothers wouldn’t have been caught dead at a gay pride parade, never mind marching in one. How could Dave look at a scene like that and not feel it was something ­special?

“Because this isn’t what will be on the 11 o’clock news,” Dave later explained. “What will be are all the freaks, the go-go boys, the drag queens. If we really wanted to send a message about gay pride,” he said, shaking his head, “we’d all march down the street in three-piece suits.”

I DIDN'T UNDERSTAND it then. But I do now. Let me be clear: I have complete and utter respect for the pioneers who laid the foundation for my civil rights, from the authors like Crisp and Baldwin to those feisty Stonewall drag queens. I’m not arguing that the path toward equality for gays in this country wasn’t paved with the occasional rhinestone. What I am arguing is that the tactics that won us the first round won’t work in the next.

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