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Gay pride
By adamg on Sat, 06/11/2005 - 8:23am
Boston Pride photos. More pride photos.
Chris wonders where all the gay bars have gone - and what that means for gay identity in Boston:
... Let others hash out debates between assimilation and seperation, between a parade of militant drag queens/kings and one of State Street and Bank of America gay employee groups, between sex radicals and bridal fairs; my sympathies hover between the two anyway. There's a bigger issue here: the city no longer has a functioning gay ghetto and the bar scene is pale shadow of a metropolitan scene. The corner of Clarendon and Tremont, the focal point of the parade and what used to be an epicenter of Boston's gay life, on any given week night is 80 percent straight these days. Pockets of lesbians, gay men and transgendered folk pop up around the city - Dorchester, JP, the wide swath of Cambridge, parts of Roxbury, Chelsea and Eastie - but everyone is too scattered out to cohere as a community. ...
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Comments
w00t!
Hey Adam. You might also want to try flikring "Dyke March," as that was the big event last night. (bostondykemarch.com)
Also, a lot of people in the community are preferring "Pride 2005" or "Boston Pride" or whatnot, since the bashers refer to such things as "gay pride events" or "gay pride flags" and most of us don't.
And hey, if accepting folks can commandeer enough seemingly innocuous words (pride, ally, community, equality, top, bottom) and make the bigots think that these words are OMG TEH GAY and are not to be used, there won't be enough left and the haters won't be able to talk.
Boston Pride
...My mind is so boggled by the huge disappointment of the Boston Pride Festival yesterday. Coming here from Atlanta and experiencing such a fun, out, and social gay community there, it is just mind-blowing to see such a pitiful and poor organization of the new england gay community... first of all... where are all the gay people??? In the most liberal place in the country where is all the pride and support?? There weren't any gay flags flying in the humid boston air... there were no signs letting the general public know about this special day...Secondly... why the major lack of festiviy at the festival? .. no arts, no crafts, no beer (what is that about??) It was so surprising and hugely disappointing to see such a low support for something this community claims to have such interest and support for..... what's the deal??? Who knew the south was so much more spirited and proud of being gay...
Aw!
Welcome! It really depends where you go. Like most communities in Boston, the queer community has a little bit of an insider/outsider edge to it, so to find the real action, you have to know where it's being held, otherwise you aren't worthy of joining in.
Never been to Atlanta, but...
Well since we don't have to live in the closet, as we are accepted just about everywhere in Mass, we don't have the crying need to explode on this one day like we used to. This is the same reason why we don't have as many gay bars and gay restaurants as we used to. We're becoming part of the larger culture and becoming less segregated.
Having said that, I never thought much of the stuff at the Common, but I thought the parade was a fun experience. Where are all the gay people you ask? Hmmm.you must have had your eyes closed or something.
Tis true...
When I was single, I could go to pretty much any "hip" coffeeshop or bar and find girls to mingle with. While I belonged and belong to a lot of GLBT sociological/political organizations, I don't do a lot of socializing at "gay" places, simply because it does tend to be pretty mixed in Boston. The downside of this though is that if I do want to go to a gay club or gay bar one night, the only ones really going on in Boston are total hookup bars, where people are there for one reason and one reason only. Which is irritating if you're not looking to hook up but just looking to be really flamingly dykey that night, and which is also irritating because then bigots hear about these places and get the idea that the "gay hangouts" are a bunch of meat markets. Which, yeah, they largely are, but then these people equate this with queers being a bunch of pervs.