Well, duh, might be the reaction of any gay St. Petersburger, especially anyone (like yours truly) who’s lived in St. Pete during the last decade. In the brand new graphic above and on T-shirts that’ll be on sale during the St. Pete Pride Festival, zeitgeist-meister Chad Mize aka Chizzy has once again struck a perfectly self-congratulatory, perfectly accurate (well, OK, a bit aspirational) note in recognizing that St. Pete of all places has become a gay mecca-in-the-making. In fact, you might protest that we belong on the list more than our sister to the south; by all accounts, Key West has sacrificed its gay cachet at the altar of cruise ships and bro bars.
But St. Pete? A gay mecca? Who woulda thunk? My now-husband and I were pleasantly surprised to discover the gay-friendly, practically gay-founded enclave of Roser Park when we moved here in 2005, but I don’t think we could have envisioned the progress this city would make — hell, this country would make — in the years that followed. The election of three count ‘em three openly gay City Council candidates. The unabashedly gay-friendly mayor who not only raised the rainbow flag over City Hall but wrapped himself in it during last year’s parade. The fact that LGBTQ voters in St. Pete have become a bloc to be reckoned with, and that St. Pete Pride is now celebrating its 15th birthday.
But then there’s this: We may have gotten so thoroughly assimilated into the political and social landscape that our sexual orientations are beside the point. As St. Pete City Council Chair Darden Rice says in Kate Bradshaw’s story on how the gay community affects local politics, “That’s kind of what we hope for… to, oddly, get to a sense where it doesn’t matter as much.”
Yet assimilation bugs some folks in the gay-o-sphere. In Philadelphia, where I spent many years of my working life before moving to Florida — and where I apparently was the first journalist to use the term “gayborhood” — there’s now a minor flap about the dismaying (to some) incursion of straights into a hallowed gay bar named Woody’s. The New York Times recently ran a column entitled “Is Pride Still for Queer People Like Me?” in which the writer bemoaned all the straight folks enjoying gay pride parades and all the corporations trying to market to us — the nerve!
The Gay Agenda: Pride and beyond — check out these special and ongoing events
The argument about Woody’s may ring a bell for habitués of the late, still-lamented Georgie’s Alibi, but I don’t remember anyone being all that upset about the mix of gay and straight there. In fact, the ease of coexistence was one of the bar’s chief appeals. One of the most resonant arguments for keeping the St. Pete Pride parade route in the Grand Central District was the heartening sight of all those straight families with kids cheering us on from their front lawns. While we won’t know till Saturday night whether that same community vibe will animate the waterfront parade, the mood around St. Pete seems to be "We’re here, we’re queer, you’re straight, that’s great, let’s party!” (In my office, at least two of the straight guys I work with seem to have more gay male friends than I do. That Will & Grace reboot slated for TV in the fall? Behind the times. They should have done Will & Jake instead.)
So if everything’s so copacetic for LGBTQ’s and their A’s (that’s A for Ally; for a useful rundown of all the other letters in the acronym, let's talk to Panamory), we’ll ask the same question that we placed on the cover of the issue about Tampa’s revived parade earlier this spring: Why Pride?
Because Pulse was just last year. Because an asshole in Old Northeast is dredging up homophobic tropes on his homemade misspelled lawn signs. Because parents are still throwing kids out of their homes because they dare to come out as gay or trans. Because our current prez is more interested in “protecting” his voters on the religious right than he is about protecting everyone’s equal rights.
But the best part, and maybe the best reason for LGBT’s and A’s to keep marching, is summed up in Nick’s comments to Huffington Post France:
“It’s rare to see these types of images in the media, same-sex couples growing old together. The youth needs to see that it is possible to find a loving partner and that the relationship can last.”
So show your colors and show off your relationships on Facebook, on Beach Drive, in Washington, D.C. We’ve come a long way and we deserve to celebrate — whatever acronym we choose.
This article appears in Jun 22-29, 2017.
