Shelter
An autobiography in Pride Months
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May 2025: It will be June in a week. I’m sitting on a fully booked Amtrak from Manhattan to D.C. for an old friend’s wedding. My recently purchased suit is in a bag over my head. I’m surrounded by people dealing the sort of damage to one another typical on mass transit. (“I apologize,” a woman’s raspy voice says behind me to the passenger next to her, “for the way I asked you to move over earlier. I’m headed to a funeral. I’m bent out of shape.”) Our next stop is Wilmington, Delaware. I’ll forget everyone here, including the woman in the yellow hoodie snoozing in the seat next to me, unless our train derails, giving me a reason to commit faces to memory. Otherwise, we’ll remain: strangers, going somewhere.
I haven’t lived in D.C. in almost a decade. It still shocks me how little time I actually lived there. One-and-a-half years, so brief that the “half” feels necessary to include. It feels much longer, feels unlikely that I could have pushed so much life through so narrow a window. Maybe because it will be June in a week, or maybe because World Pride is to be held here soon, a fact that, given present circumstances, sounds like rolling a Pride parade through Mordor [cinemagraph of Tolkien’s elves in crop tops and harnesses, drifting by on floats, among flames and plumes of smoke], or maybe—I’ll get into it later, but I’m thinking about Pride, and how I’ve never written honestly or compellingly about it despite writing about it many times.
Pride is hard to write about. The subject tends to turn us scribes of Limp-Wrist-Landia into comms people working with a limited, pre-approved vocabulary from upstairs. In the provided rainbow word cloud: Community. Love. Resilience. Joy. Equality. Then, in the rainy, gray underbelly: Hate. Oppression. -phobia. Inequality. This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just that, generally speaking, no queer writing at the professional level is really itching to write about Pride, and typically only does so if paid by some magazine or corporation as part of a “Pride Package” with specific ideas as to what shape those stories should take. That shape is not one with sharp points.
That’s always been fine by me. June used to be a time when G-listers such as yours truly could rake in some extra cash from a few media outlets and, if luck be a lesbian, maybe a shaving cream company. This year, however, for reasons I trust are entirely intuitable, my inbox is devoid of emails from cheery public relations professionals opening with “Hey John!” and closing with a discreet nod toward compensation, save for one lonely pitch from a Turkish hair transplant clinic, which was forwarded to me by a friend1 and not related at all to Pride Month, and which I am seriously considering for the comped trip to Istanbul.
The other reason Pride is hard to write about is that a lot of gay people tend to struggle to write or make art about gay people. I’m not exactly sure why this is. The arts are crawling with us. Creative industries have depended on our gifts for time immemorial. But when at last we get the opportunity to center ourselves, the output is very often corny. People like to say this is because of those meddling straights who only let squeaky-clean narratives about us make it to audiences. Maybe. But I speculate there’s some instinct of self-preservation at play, that the desire to “do right” by “the community” lends a stilted, ambassador-like officialism to such projects that reads as artificial. These projects often leave me wondering if maybe we really are better off smuggling our sensibilities into the mainstream under Nicole Kidman’s wigs.
Back to Pride, which I’m thinking about on this Amtrak to D.C. It’s too bad so few people actually want to write about it, because the more I think about it, the more it feels like a wonderfully absurd subject. Pride is an annual call to sentiment and solidarity between groups of people who, were it not for the impressive organizational powers of other people’s disdain, would have precious little to do with one another.
This haphazardness is more obvious when comparing, say, a Black trans woman baker (wanted to give her a fun job) to a white gay hedge fund manager (or something), but is also observable within each letter of LGBTQ+, that syllabic obstacle course that’s the bane of every progressive politician giving a speech in June. With the coming of Pride each year, you are sure to find G-on-G and B-on-B violence, fierce disagreements on what the tradition should mean and who it should center (Is there +-on-+ violence? You bet2). This combination of moral urgency to put on a united front and the fact that in a perfect world we’d be complete strangers leads inevitably to awkward collisions between ideals and appetites.
Additionally, while we’re encouraged to find strength in community, we’re also encouraged to find it in individualism, in ME!, as evidenced in our increasingly kaleidoscopic banner. I hope the dear reader is familiar with Power Rangers, because the choice visual here is that of a Megazord—a giant, colorful mech patchworked out of smaller mechs, capable of taking down threats bigger than any one group could handle on their own. Only, we don’t operate with anywhere near that level of coordination. As much as Pride is a call to assembly, it’s a call to discord. There’s a reliable rift between ideas of how the collective ought to move and what its individual composite parts want to do: DJ / overthrow capitalism / ketamine / a seminar on starting a small business / anal sex / etc. Allies—human and corporate alike—do well to ignore this infighting and wish us a Happy Pride regardless.
In many ways, I find this tradition beautiful. In other ways, it makes me yearn to be an ant with no concept of identity beyond “locate sandwich.” In recent years, intracommunity skirmishes have played out on social media, where it’s not uncommon to see, in the dead of winter, a screed from some stranger to sunlight declaring that white gay men are trying to turn Pride into a debauched, kinky fuckfest. This sentiment, generously called “discourse,” ticks up significantly in the weeks approaching June, and is interesting in that it offers the opportunity for gays around my age to witness the morbidly curious ventriloquist act of Tucker Carlson’s voice coming out of an anime character, and in that it’s a reminder of the delta between “Pride as it should be” and “Pride as it’s experienced.”
It’s clear to me that, in addition to being an event or parade, “Pride” is a convenient way to make manifest that intangible “Us” so as to more effectively yell in its face and tell it how to behave. Regardless of how one thinks Pride “should be,” whether one believes it’s too corporate or too NSFW, whether one thinks it ought to be more welcoming of all people or that it’s too permissive in who it includes, it remains staggering to me that such a slim percentage of the world’s population, a sliver containing everything from a middle-aged gay man collaborating on war crimes abroad to a teen pansexual barista with “it/itself” pronouns, might feel obligated to engage in annual debate over the soul of this precious, amorphous Thing.
Maybe it’s because social media is in a state of fracture and the regularly scheduled “discourse” feels impotent, or maybe it’s because our present cultural landscape feels inhospitable to Pride, much less nitpickery, or maybe it’s because I’m on an overbooked Amtrak to D.C., where JLo is to headline World Pride in a matter of days, and I’m instead going for a wedding; whatever the reason, I’m experiencing for the first time in many years an outsideness to Pride, and appreciating it through alien eyes, and I’m kind of obsessed with it: A dizzying array of individuals, asking, How should we move?
Every year on this rapidly-heating earth that I’ve celebrated Pride it’s been presented to me as “more important now than ever.” I’ve never once experienced a Pride that was announced as “roughly as important as last year’s” or “all things considered, not as urgent this time around.” This has been true under Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump 2.0, and each time I duly accept this premise as a card-carrying Alphabet Mafioso.
The last time I attended Now-More-Than-Ever-Fest was in Brooklyn last year. I hadn’t attended anything like it since going to Tulsa Pride in 2019, on a free trip from one of those “Hey John!” PR emails I used to receive, where I saw a drag queen ride by in a truck, holding a large, disinterested tortoise over her head. Being gay is a daily exercise in magical realism. This morning, a toned, disembodied ass 423 miles away asked me how my day was going, and said I reminded him of a Greek man whose every desire he’d fulfilled in a hotel in Budapest, and might my name be Stavros? No worries if not.
I felt too old and too young to be at Brooklyn Pride. In my mind, there are two poles on the Pride Event Spectrum. One is a ticketed event in a warehouse with sweaty, shirtless gay men zonked on substances the CDC isn’t even aware of yet, and the other is a tarped booth on a closed-off street manned by a sturdy lesbian collecting signatures on a clipboard, often accompanied by a mug of complimentary pens sitting on a card table. Brooklyn Pride fell on the latter end of the spectrum, and it seemed to me an event either for very young people figuring themselves out via visually imposing accessories or much older people animated by a sense of obligation nobler and stronger than mine. This makes sense. Street Pride best serves, I believe, those who still have some kittenish innocence in their eyes, and I am at this point in my life more of a grizzled alleycat for whom slices of ham are sporadically left out on a paper plate. Lumbering down the street, I resisted the urge to hiss at the youngin’s for fun.
My friend Greg, who’d recently moved to New York, had invited me, but Greg is just as likely to invite me to a Beyblade tournament, so I didn’t necessarily connect our being there to our sexualities. To be honest, I did have the “no kink at Pride” anime avatars in my head and had both eyes peeled for leather pup masks, and was frankly disappointed not to find any. I’m not sure what I was hoping to see—maybe some tangible, useful metaphor to serve as a bridge between how people talk about Pride and how Pride operates in physical space. But I was distracted by how not unique it all was. I was enjoying myself, but Brooklyn Pride looked suspiciously like the Italian American street festival with a rainbow paint job, and the Italian American street festival had meanwhile looked an awful lot like the Puerto Rican street festival with cannolis, and indeed my first beverage at Brooklyn Pride was pineapple juice in a plastic pineapple vessel that was sold to me, I was able to confirm, by a Puerto Rican.3
This is to say that Brooklyn Pride was basically a themed street festival, accessible to fans of fruit and funnel cakes alike. My favorite sight was a Chinese Peking duck cart hocking bao buns, a “sure, why not” rainbow flag planted atop it, marking it safe for queer consumption. I loved how real the cart was, how physical; heat, steam, crackling oil, meat. When I think of food and Pride I think of vodka tonics and fiber supplements, so I guess I don’t think of food at all. I felt a spiritual kinship with this cart. I thought of myself peddling my wares in June. I ordered two bao buns, which were good, but greasy, and gave me a bit of a stomach ache.
My time in D.C. coincided neatly, conspicuously so, with my coming out and with Obergefell v. Hodges. I find it difficult to imagine a gay coming-of-age other than the one I inherited: Bullied ruthlessly as a fruity child in Oklahoma during the Bush years, I came out right around when Obama was starting to tease public support for gay marriage, and then I moved to D.C. for my first media job just in time to see same-sex marriage legalized nationwide. The succession of these events made the narrative arc of progress look rather like a stiff arrow pointing northeast.
I remember some months after I moved to D.C. interviewing Jim Obergefell on the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision in June. We were sitting close, quite close, in a white row house on a cobbled street in Georgetown. We were sitting by the fireplace. He was wearing a bowtie and glasses and had an open, bewildered face that gave him a “regular guy caught up in something big” vibe. A boon for us. The kind of face we needed. He was trying to legally marry his partner of many years, Arthur, who had ALS. Phobes beware: we’d located the world’s most sympathetic gay.
In the row house, his Regular Joeness was greatly enhanced by the hawkish figures in crisp blazers and pantsuits hovering over his shoulder. In D.C., these sorts are distinguished by the lightless intensity in their eyes as veterans of the machine. “Jim,” one or another of them would say, occasionally interrupting our interview to usher his attention to this or that, always in a protective tone that signaled to me and other media in the room that this nice, earnest man was being guarded by people who really played ball.
That was alright by me. I’ve long forgotten the questions I asked. Softballs, for sure. As a young journalist working his first job, I was too preoccupied with the cinema of myself being in that room to be bothered by someone twice my age trying to intimidate me (Up until moving to D.C., I’d not been privy to the fact that capital-H History really does play out in physical locations). If anything, the presence of these severe professionals enhanced the mood. I found them comforting: There were adults wearing expensive shoes in The Room where history is drawn up, and they were on our side. Things were being handled. Things would continue to be handled. Things would turn out the way they should.
It bewilders me now that, as smart as I thought I was, I could have ever had such blind faith in—what? Not the government, nor in any single righteous cause, but in the notion of meticulous, adult mechanics in expensive shoes keeping everything on the tracks and toward where it should go, that indeed there was a place where things should go at all, and that it would always, in the end, be the right place. The villains of those days now seem quaint. Kim Davis. The Westboro Baptist Church. Rick Santorum and the Republicans like him—eminently mockable stooges oblivious to their inevitable, total cultural defeat. LOL.
Some short time after that interview, the Supreme Court ruling came down. I was in a gay bar called Town when it did. I was seeing this guy at the time who was in the Gay Men’s Chorus. We’d all known what the ruling would be (hat tip to those mechanics working tirelessly somewhere behind the curtain), so the chorus had been set up to sing right when we got official word from the nearest TV, and when it came it sure did feel like the happy ending in one of those corny gay movies I callously dismissed earlier. Love Wins.
The White House was lit up in a rainbow. I was walking hand-in-hand with the guy I was seeing, one of the sweetest guys I’ve dated; maybe the sweetest. He was tall and had big hands and a nose ring and worked on the bottom floor of my gym. We made eyes at each other for weeks until, one day, drunk at Town (always Town), we passed each other, stopped, traced back, grabbed each other, and started kissing. I’d spend nights at his place, cuddled up and watching anime. “You two are cute!” I remember a woman saying, passing us by on the street, and my memory of that night is somehow recorded outside myself, because I see me walking with him down Pennsylvania Avenue, holding hands.
We were not to have a happy ending, he and I. It wasn’t necessarily a bad one. It was the more common kind—unruly life, stubbornly refusing to maintain a desired shape. We were at the Hyatt Hotel for Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend, or MAL, which is not the stuff of gay Hallmark movies, and is more the kind of thing that, if publicized, would jeopardize community support in the Midwest. Unlike Pride, the White House has never officially recognized MAL, though many of its employees from both sides of the aisle can be found there each year, strung up by their toes in hastily constructed dungeons in hotel rooms. There’s an unspoken agreement that people not talk about such things.4 Far from the most egregious example of kayfabe in D.C.
This guy I was seeing, he and I were standing next to a cart selling poppers near a rack of leather cuffs with trigger clips. Him: “How do you feel about us?” Me, gently evil: “I like how we are right now.” Him, unconvincingly: “Me too.” Slow tectonics saw to the rest. I moved to New York, believing, not without precedent, that better things were always further north.
The morning after the Pulse nightclub shooting in June, I boarded an Amtrak from New York to D.C. My doing this continues to be of passing interest to me, how I did it out of a homing instinct; a gay pigeon. The shooting had taken place the night before. I’d been in a gay bar in Williamsburg called TNT (This n’ That) that’s long since been shuttered and was shaped like a TNT barrel inside. I was a fan of big city sorcery such as this.
I remember getting an inkling of the news before I went to bed around 3 a.m., then waking up to the sound of my roommate crying. He was looking at his TV, which was situated on the floor, the same TV soon to inform us of Brexit and the results of the 2016 presidential election. The facts trickled in: 49 dead. More injured. It had been Latin night. Returning to narrow populations within narrow populations, even though the shooting had happened in Orlando, I and many New Yorkers I knew spent that morning sending near-hysterical texts. “Please answer me.” My friends were safe, though one had been slated to perform that night.
My actions over the next 24 hours were automatic. I don’t remember planning anything out or using my brain, won’t even bother trying to illustrate the gaps between my being in my apartment and my being among a flock of other gay pigeons at Stonewall, where Nick Jonas of Jonas Brothers fame was solemnly addressing us, and where it wouldn’t have surprised me to notice that my feet weren’t quite working, wouldn’t have surprised me if Nick Jones had turned to me and informed me that there was an algebra class I’d neglected to take in high school that I’d have to move back to Oklahoma to complete, and my plea that I was an adult now would go unheeded, and everyone at Stonewall would laugh at me (the 25-year-old high schooler); wake up, wake up.
I was transported by these same nightmare physics to Union Station, where I linked up with Blake, my good friend of many years who I’d met the very first day I moved to D.C. We’d matched on Tinder while I was touring my new office. I make friends by dating them for a bit. Blake and I warped to an outdoor vigil in Dupont Circle. I saw people I recognized, standing with their arms crossed and heads down. I remember feeling at the time that we were classmates who all went to the same school—our childhoods on the outside, visible. I remember being frustrated with myself. I can’t really cry in public.
Then we were at a church for an open mic “let it out” kind of thing. We were in the rafters, Blake and I. It was completely packed. This quickly became something of a vomitorium (read: the ahistorical but undeniably more compelling definition of “designated place where Romans went to vomit”)5 for the glut of emotions no one knew where to put. Coughing, sputtering, snot-bubbly angst came gushing out through a single microphone being passed around; a vaguely ritualistic letting. I found myself wincing at the one-upmanship that tends to materialize, I know from experience, in group therapy settings, and Blake felt similarly, and so we left, but not before a clergy member with a “queer pastor” vibe, you know the one, looks like they say “affirming” quite a bit, walked up and gave Blake a big hug, which, because I knew Blake, looked like someone trying to nuzzle a feral raccoon.
Next on our involuntary flight path was Trade, a gay bar we’d gone to many times before. We stopped at a CVS on the way. I just need to. One of us said this, I think. We’d not engaged in any “letting it out,” and so we were swollen with Something, and I thought if I didn’t take a sharp needle and pierce the skin to release some of it we’d both surely explode. Blake was standing there, browsing fluorescently lit Gatorades. I crept up behind him and tenderly rested my chin on his shoulder. “It should have been you,” I whispered in his ear. He jumped and squealed and put his hands to his mouth. He still brings this up sometimes. “One of your funnier moments,” he said, when I asked if I could include it.
We made it to Trade. The last time we’d gone there together, Blake had had to peel me off the bathroom floor following the 2015 GLAAD Awards, where the pink, complimentary cocktails had been deceptively powerful, marking the first and last time I ever got blackout drunk. “My GLAAD Award…” I’d moaned into Blake’s shoulder as he’d walked me fallen-soldier style into an Uber. “Nooo…” I had not, in fact, won a GLAAD Award.
Blake and I perched ourselves by the front window. Soon, there would be bodyguards posted at the entrance of Trade and at gay bars all over the country, patting people down for weapons. But not yet. It was still daylight out. The dim insides of a gay bar before 6 p.m. or so hold, on even the brightest of days, a purple melancholy. People on the street passed us by, and I looked at them, and I thought I could tell by looking at them if they, too, were being piloted, or if they weren’t.
We ordered drinks. I felt a peculiar sense of heritage sitting there next to Blake. Though we were both in our twenties, I was reminded of those bitter old queens at the bar that people often talk about but rarely interact with, men who are commonly regarded as a bit sad, but aren’t without their powers of intimidation—they’ve nothing to lose, or so the young and dumb believe, and aren’t bound by political correctness, and if you wander too close they’ll either pounce on you or pare you down. They do command some respect, the bitter old queens, for having endured.
Does it matter, I’ve wondered every now and then, that the facts surrounding the Pulse shooting aren’t as clear as we felt them to be that day? Does it matter that there’s a strong possibility that the shooter, Omar Mateen, chose Pulse at random, or that his first target may well have been Disney Springs, a shopping mall, or that it was later found, contrary to some reports, that he’d never downloaded Grindr?
Trying to get the facts, all these years later, I feel stupid and pedantic. “Was Omar Mateen homophobic?” I asked Google, forgetting that these days I can expect an AI to answer. I probably burned up a bottle’s worth of water asking a machine to divine the inner workings of a mind that committed to murdering 49 people. But it did lead me to a fair bit of literature on the subject, which I read. He was abusive to his wife. He was angry a lot. He did express discomfort with gays. Click. Click. Click. You can spend a lot of time in this life, as I have, trying to ferret your way into the heads of people who, literally, in this case, would kill you without really thinking about it.
Despite all that, I want to say that, yes, it does matter what the facts were. I want to know. I think we should always want to know. But how we think and how we move can rely on distinct circuitries, and there are days ruled by the former and by the latter, and I can tell you which day that June day in D.C. was. What continues to be of passing interest to me now is the series of choiceless movements I made. Is this how we move? Is this what brought us together in the first place? Violence, instinct, victim? Are we all mingling in an exit wound? There’s surely more to it than that. Someone smarter will know. Someone with the right questions.
“I brought up Pulse a couple of days ago,” Blake said, when I texted him today. “Still kind of a vibe-killer!”
We were three naked bodies splayed out on the beach under the sun. The beach always sounds like a pretty picture. Then comes the sand. This beach wasn’t pretty. It was one of those gay nude beaches tucked off to the side, selected precisely because no one else wants to go there. Waves crashed against toothy, malicious rocks. Pebbles and mysterious brittle sea flora dug into my back through the towel. This was last year.
Behind us, near the part of the beach where sand gives way to more rock and to gnarled thickets, older men with shiny sunscreened calves and wearing gas station sunglasses stalked around, up to some sly vice just out of sight. My friend and I were days into visiting another friend of mine. We were staying with him. I was deliriously happy that day, as well as anxious, albeit in a remote way. It’s the same familiar anxiety that tends to creep up on me at gay beaches such as these, and has nothing to do with my cock being out. I consider it like adult acne. How old do I have to get before these high-schoolish questions go away for good—Do you really like me? Am I doing this right? Are you sure?
Getting to this beach had required some skipping and hopping and scooting. We were lying there, the three of us, playing word games. I was toying with a pebble in my hand until the pebble broke in two, at which point I started playing with its halves. I discovered that these pebbles broke into such geometric twos that they presented a little challenge to piece back together. “What are you up to?” my friend, the golden-tanned local, asked.
“It’s a puzzle,” I said, showing him the rock. He tested it out for himself, encountered the same game in it, then selected a different rock to break between his fingers. He gasped, delighted. Another puzzle. We were on a beach absolutely teeming with puzzles. We would endeavor to find the superlative one to bring home. The three of us got work, breaking, studying, and comparing. “This one’s kind of a flop,” my friend, the other visitor, said of his puzzle, tossing it.
I’ve been to many beaches like this in my life, beaches with names like Dead Dick’s Cove or whatever. Many neighborhoods like them as well. I think about them sometimes, these places, and attempt to map them onto my admittedly inchoate ideas about how we move and why we so routinely end up in these unwanted corners of the world together, places only accessible by an elaborate secret handshake of a journey. Bus. Train. Boat. Dune. Give the lady five bucks. They put on shows there. Standing room only, unless you get there really, really early. I’m interested in the upside-down criteria for these spots. The more impractical, the better.
Unwanted? At the start, yes, but these places tend to follow a similar trajectory: No one wants to go there because that’s where the druggies and the hookers are, and then the fags show up, and within some decades there’s a coffee shop with an unironed Pride flag hanging in the window, proffering almond croissants or matcha lattes or whatever imagined overpriced goodie steams your milk. I’ve experienced this in many different countries, and even continents. I will land in a foreign city, meet up with some guy, ask if “the gayborhood” is really the such-and-such place that I read about, and he will almost always scoff and say, “if you’re rich.”
Some places, though, still have their teeth, warding people off. I like the idea of these places more than I like being in them—pathfinders of yestergay, forgive me, but I love a fancy coffee shop. Regardless, the idea is beautiful. Much attention is rightfully given to our leaders, figures whose faces we might paint big on the wall of a bar slinging expensive drinks. We owe a lot to the people who stood up and marched. In Pride Month, one might get the impression that we are a people who don’t walk, but march. But we have heritage here, too; with the people slinking with hunched shoulders around the peripheries, seeking a thorny spot in the shade.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I do like being in those places. I don’t think I’d have enjoyed myself quite as much as I did if I’d spent that day on a beautiful beach with fine, powdery sand. I’m not much of a beach person to begin with, to be honest, so it was definitely the company.
My friend and I still say, “It’s a puzzle!” when something breaks. The inside joke is that the object has lost its original value, but, in breaking, has gained another. Providing, of course, that the person receiving the joke is willing to look at it optimistically.
The first Pride I ever went to was Oklahoma City’s in 2013, right after I came out. Taylor, a friend of mine from my hometown who’d come out some years before I did, invited me to lunch at the Iguana Mexican Grill, which looks a good deal aways from the gay district on the map.6 We must have been traveling by car, and I’m just looking at Google Maps as a New Yorker now, spoiled by trains and with unhinged ideas in my head about what counts as “walking distance.”
I was wearing an oversized, sleeveless tank, supposing I ought to show some arm for the fellas, and feeling anxious. I had no idea what awaited me, and had rather been given the impression by straight male peers that I would be immediately set upon like a piece of raw meat chucked into a cartoon piranha tank, an idea I wasn’t altogether opposed to, but which did reveal itself to be more or less a fantasy concocted by the male heterosexual mind, which is capable of being many leagues gayer than any of those of my present-day colleagues on the Grindr grid.
The parade was to be held at the District, a tucked-away cluster of multiple gay bars that I would describe as “not too far from the mall, kind of by the Olive Garden.” The event was just as the very first level of the Pride video game should have been. It was easy. I was just learning how to move. I had a rainbow sticker on my face. I stood in the crowd, watching the floats: We here at “local BBQ restaurant” wish you a Happy Pride, as do we, your neighborhood bank, and as do we, your favorite dentist. Please remember to floss. Across the street from me were people I recognized from my university, and their presence was comforting to me, as seeing a child in line for the same roller coaster might be: If he can do it, so can I.
After ten or so more floats and already out of pocket space for additional complimentary pens, I’d lost my jitters and was even beginning to think this “going to Pride” business was actually quite dull until the next float came by and dramatically shifted the mood. A drag queen standing in an unadorned truck bed was shouting into a megaphone, and whatever she was shouting was inspiring visceral reactions from those who received her message.
When at last she was close enough to us to overpower the fading sound of a float blasting that timeless Pride classic of “Party Rock Anthem” I could clearly see her mottled makeup, which had not been painted to be looked at at such a close distance. “Tornado! Watch!” she said, enunciating each word with drill-sergeant militarism. “Seek! Shelter! She! Is coming! For us!”
Sure enough, the sky was yellow and green, and the air carried a foreboding scent that any Okie would immediately recognize, wicked and wet. My first thought, as I followed a throng of fellow Pride-goers toward the nearest building, was of all those pastors who blamed hurricanes and other such deleterious weather phenomena on gay sex. My second thought was that this was kind of a beautiful moment of true equality—the tornado was coming for us all.
The nearest building with a basement was Phoenix Bar, an ur-gay bar with sticky floors, stiff drinks, dim lighting, and a perfunctory disco ball. I filed down the stairs with a few dozen others. The crowd had scattered to different bars, and this one was ours. I’ve forgotten exactly what their faces looked like, my comrades. I remember: a shock of white, stringy hair; a young, flushed face; flip-flops; an eyebrow piercing; wrinkled skin; bangles; a pack of cigarettes; suspenders; a spiked collar; glasses; a mohawk; a beard; a pink halter top. I remember the sound of the wind, and the thunder. I remember the mood being giggly, naughty—“Girl…”
It’s still probably the most diverse room I’ve ever been in during Pride. We didn’t have much of a choice, given the circumstances. It’s not like we had anywhere else we could have gone. But us going together meant something to me. Despite my cynicism, it still means something.
May 2025: I just boarded an Amtrak back to New York, also fully booked. We’re on the cusp of June, but it’s chilly and rainy today. I’m carefully operating my laptop on one side of the plastic little foldout tray. There’s a leak overhead. Every minute or so, drip…. drip…. It’s raining a lot. It rained so much that this morning on my way to Union Station I saw water rushing in thick, translucent braids down the side of the street. Seeing this, I thought about how things work; about water, moving as it must.
Edited by the legendary Rachel Miller at Just Good Shit.
Hi, Rachel!
I’ve seen it and it’s lawless.
Most Puerto Ricans are eager to confirm this.
As Madison Cawthorn can attest.
I don’t care how imposing this parenthetical aside is, I earned it. I spent, like, two hours going deep on “vomitorium” for this one fucking sentence. Yes, I knew it wasn’t “a room where rich Romans went to vomit so they could eat more,” but it turns out what I initially thought “vomitorium” actually meant was also wrong, and because I want everyone to suffer just as I’ve suffered I’m linking an explainer here. Yes, I should have just gone with another word. I hate writing. I hate writing. I hate writing.
Might they have changed locations? I swear I walked right from my bulbous glass of margarita into the not-piranha-tank.
I want to crawl inside this piece of writing and take shelter too
I loved the part about the alleycat being fed ham. This is an amazing essay. Difference is what makes life make sense!