- Author
- 06/09/2017
- 1,238 Words
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- 18 Comments
Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are based on the authors' lives and experiences and may be changed to protect personal information. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Pride Month, and other Haibun - 2. Pride Month
.
Pride Month
Haibun
Situations are dynamic and flow.
Take for instance my dental appointment yesterday. It was about 2:30 in the afternoon. My walk to the subway station was ordinary, but I did enjoy the cooling breeze as I went.
A pocketful of quarters went into the ticket machine and gave me an amount of credit to use for a round trip and then some. I had my book on the train and got lost in it pretty quickly – Scotty Bowers’ Full Service, about all the Gay men he knew and slept with in L.A.’s golden age. I was reading the sections on Jimmy Dean, and what a brat he appeared to Bowers; how the young man skulked and ground out a cigarette on his host’s silk carpet because no was talking to him at a party. A sad young man, maybe. A guy who never felt love in his life was sincere, even less so the praise fawning people foisted on him for their own purposes.
The most precious of jewels
glow different in the flame of candlelight;
Some shine green in the sun
but ruby-red in night’s intimacy.
Thus some people seem fools
but maybe it’s judging them at first sight
makes me the foolish one,
changing like a flame all I chance to see.
◇ ◇ ◇
Lost in thoughts of what I read concerning Tab Hunter's broken heart when the man he loved – Anthony Perkins – turned into shame-faced sellout and entered a sham marriage with a woman, I have to say I completely forgot what time of year it is: June. Pride Month.
That state did not persist for long though, because clearing the ticket area, I was thrust into the open-air plaza that forms the central adit and exit of Powell Street Station. Looking stories up into the sky, rainbow stripes greeted me glinting in the sunlight and moving slightly in the afternoon breeze. Stepping onto the escalator, this impression was only heightened, for the pair of extra-large flags trooping the granite entrance to Bank of America were matched in under-glass fashion within the Gap’s flagship store. Both of these structures awaited at the top of the moving steps, and formed two sides of the little plaza for the cable car roundabout. Thousands of tourists will see these Pride displays.
Once I was on the sidewalk, an easy turn of the head showed me the rainbow banners flanking the sides of all the gloriously tall streetlights along Market Street, the city’s main drag. These tall-shouldered lights, with Pride stripes to their left and right, march all the way from the Ferry Building and the blue waters of the bay to the heart of the Castro; in other words, for miles and miles.
Memories, do they form instantly,
or through the slow accrual of activating them?
How many times I have been here,
and yet today it feels like the first time.
Floods appear remembering the first time,
my first Pride Parade in 1995.
Of one spent on a June Sunday so long ago now,
but when I’m back here, does time matter?
So those memories, do we talk of them as ‘was,’
or are they as real now as they ever were?
For me, it’s all one and the same;
If I am here, then so are they.
◇ ◇ ◇
Around the corner at Fifth Street, I began walking up that thoroughfare, noting how another flagship store, this time Old Navy, had Rainbow Flags hanging in their windows like curtains – free and easy. Such casual celebration brought smiles to my face as well. All-out grander and display is wonderful, but so too is just saying, “We love you; we are you.”
He died this March,
Gilbert Baker,
one-time San Francisco resident,
and designer of the flag in 1978.
A symbol was needed,
one not so sad –
not the lambda of the Gay Rights resistance,
nor the pink triangle of Nazi genocide,
but a mark of ‘Us,’ survivors,
unified, diverse, and proud.
Bless you, dear friend,
Gilbert Baker,
one-time resident of San Francisco,
and creator of so much simplicity.
◇ ◇ ◇
Many of the Colors this year are Gilbert’s original eight: the six we know plus hot pink on top, for sexual energy and freedom, and turquoise near the center, for magical healing and creativity. How those two elements were lost in the first place, I guess I don’t know.
Walking along Fifth Street to the dentist and my appointment, I experienced a glow. Things have changed, right? Not all of this is done by Gay people for Gay people. Perhaps it’s arguable that the balance has shifted and that most of these Pride displays are done by other minorities to show allegiance. But, support too is needed. And what is support if not a heart-rooted understanding.
And that I feel has deepened a great deal since even 1995.
All of these feelings and thoughts were brought to an unforeseen focus only a block’s walk from the flags and banners of Market Street, for just as I got to the intersection of Fifth and Mission, a disturbing thing happened.
Queasy is memory itself, right?
For some things retrieved make one
Sick to replay them, but –
Some things must be said no matter
How nauseating the experience.
How else can understanding be passed along?
◇ ◇ ◇
A group of three friends were waiting to cross when I came up to do the same. No traffic was coming, so one of the two young men stepped into the street – not far, but a little bit into the traffic lane for sure.
The girl of the group, looking down at her cell phone, laughed and called out to her boyfriend, “The light didn’t change, dummy!”
He stood there, not wanting to come back and give her satisfaction, I guess. But then a black SUV rolled along Mission Street, wanting to turn right on Fifth, but the driver – also a young man – had to swerve to miss the guy. The driver stopped at the light; the man in street yelled at him: “Fuck you!”
The driver yelled back “Fuck you, bitch,” which amused the boy’s girlfriend. She cackled at her lover and repeated the insult: “He said ‘Fuck you, bitch!'"
But then she softened, perhaps seeing he was a bit hurt to be ‘degraded’ by the woman he presumably loves, and told him, “Ah, forget it. He sounded like a fucking faggot anyway.”
The two laughed and agreed. “Yeah, he did. Just a faggot.”
And they wonder why
we never feel good enough,
why we get so out of joint,
why we make so much of this
'pride stuff.'
They say we're too thin-skinned,
too "sensitive,"
too dunk on all-things PC,
just too much the drama queens,
but are we...?
If that's you saying those things,
you walk a mile in my shoes,
and say that again
to my face.
◇ ◇ ◇
The crosswalk light changed. Passing the group before we reached the other side, I turned and told them, “Happy Pride Month, bigots.”
Stunned, they said nothing before I went on my way, to have my teeth drilled.
~
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Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are based on the authors' lives and experiences and may be changed to protect personal information. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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