dancin' in the streets

As Erica pointed out in her blog, much of my "readership" is currently in China and can't look at blogspot sites. Ah well. Does it matter? Not too much.
Pride has come and gone. Anna wrote a good review of her thoughts on the whole thing in her blog, mostly about her insane desire for free beads :-) It was overall a pretty fun experience (I keep telling people mostly because we could drink in the street, which is probably true; standing outside for three hours or whatever watching politicians roll by would be a lot less fun without alcohol) but not entirely what I expected. It seemed like the queer community was out-represented by the aformentioned politicians and companies that were just using the parade as a way of advertising themselves. Both of these groups function in the same way: they hire a bunch of hot dancers who run around holding signs and/or giving away cheap crap with the company or politician's name on it. I wonder how many of the people in the parade were actually queer and how many were just hired to be there. Not that I have anything against straight people of course, but this damn parade is supposed to be about pride, not advertising. I guess I just wanted it to be more radical than it was. I wanted people to be in crazy costumes and radiating political awareness. Maybe I was just on the wrong street :-/
But still, there was booze, there were hot dancers (regardless of why they were there), I hopefully made some new friends, and it was goooooood to see so many happy people. Everybody was just thrilled to be there, you could tell just by looking around you. I'm sure I'll be there again next year, yelling my head of and drinking something with a high proof out of my water bottle.