C O M M E N T A R Y
Lots o f great lesbian
and gay books are
sitting in:
______Retrospect on one parade______
The impact is there; it takes seeing from a different perspective
BY
A N N D E E
H O C H M A N
ast year in this space, I criticized the first
Margins to the Mainstream campaign, the
Lesbian Community Project’s idea to boost
visibility. The campaign featured an ad
published in the Oregonian and Willamette
Week. You remember the one: Seven women
in Groucho Marx masks with the caption,
“W e’re more like you than you thought.”
I thought the ad was misguided, an
assimilationist message in a chock-full-of-
difference world. I said people should be
taught tolerance of other people, not because
they buy the same kind of toilet paper or send
their kids to the same schools, but simply
because they exist.
In that same column, I noted the gay and
lesbian float in last year’s Starlight Parade.
“We are not a new brand of detergent,” I
wrote, my tongue curled firmly in cheek. “It’s
true that the float brought the ‘G ’ and ‘L ’
words into a mainstream parade for the first
time; it’s certain that the sight of 29 gay men
and lesbians, smiling and scrubbed as a troupe
of Mouseketeers, waving flags to Disney
music, packed an emotional punch but
attitudes involve both hearts and minds.”
Writing commentary in the newspaper
carries a built-in problem. The ink dries and
sticks, but ideas keep moving. One year later,
you pull out the column from the hamster
cage or the scrapbook or the recycling pile,
and it still says exactly what you thought.
What you used to think.
That’s a difference between print and
people. Print never changes its mind.
This year, I sat in the rain for three-and-a-
half hours waiting for the gay and lesbian
float to make its second annual appearance in
the Starlight Parade. And when it winked into
view on Taylor Street, rolling steadily up the
hill toward Thirteenth Avenue all those lights
criss-crossing in the blue night air, I felt a
tingle of electricity myself.
The float was stunning. But that’s not
what changed my thinking. O f course, I
would be excited about the float; naturally I
would want to applaud the people on it—
friends and colleagues, members of our
community. The crowd at the Embers had
already given the float a rousing welcome.
Same at Tenth and Stark. I should hope so.
But my friends and I were posted up at
Thirteenth and Taylor, near the parade’s end.
We sat around a table with a striped cloth
umbrella that permitted us to get drenched
L
somewhat more gradually than oth^r people. I
was the only lesbian in our bunch of seven.
Around us were . . . well, folks. A barrel-
shaped man with a military haircut whose
mother waved wildly to one of the girls in the
Hillsboro High School band. A
thirtysomething couple, sitting side-by-side in
lawn chairs. A family, apparently veteran
Starlight Parade-goers, who set up a tent in
the back of a pick-up with a blue tarp and a
couple of 2x4s.
Folks. You know the type. You see them
at Safeway, in line at the post office, taking
their kids to the park on Sunday afternoons.
And they see us, too. They just don’t know
about it.
This is what happened when the float
neared our little comer of downtown. People
started applauding—loudly, because the
display of multi-colored lights outdid most of
what w e’d been watching for the last few
hours.
As it got closer, maybe they kept clapping
because this float seemed to be about
people—not about a beer company or an
airline. The float rolled closer still, and some
folks waved at the people standing aboard.
The riders looked spiffy in tuxedo shirts,
black slacks and cummerbunds, and they were
smiling up a storm, waving those lighted flags
in enthused, if not always perfect, rhythm.
Then the sign came into view. A big sign.
Crisp lettering on a clean white background.
“Lesbian and Gay Communities of Oregon.”
Some o f the applause dwindled o u t A few
bystanders looked embarrassed to have been
caught clapping. A few others—my table
among them—kept up a steady cheer. Some
people just looked baffled, trying to make it
all compute: Starlight Parade, gays and
lesbians . . . what’s going on here?
Those were the folks who changed my
mind. Their expressions, the murmuring to
neighbors, the second look at the float, eyes
wider than before— those were the signs of
people coming face to face with a
contradiction, a wrinkle in their world-view.
Parades aren’t designed to trouble the
consciences of bystander. Parades celebrate
the icons of our time, the images that tell us
nothing much has changed, all is right and
proper with the world. High school girls in
satin gowns. High school boys with shiny
trombones. The Royal Rosarians. The
Chamber of Commerce.
Our float refused to let the looking be
easy.
Down at the Embers a few nights before
the parade, a half-dozen riders chanted a
hopeful m an tra-”it’s not going to rain”— -
and practiced their routine to “Celebration”
by Kool and the Gang. Flags forward,
flags back, flags up, flags down.
“People have an idea about what we
look like,” said Ellen Galloway, whose
small stature and shoulder-length hair give
her a “passing” ticket she doesn’t really
want. “I walk down the street and nobody
knows I ’m a lesbian. It pisses me off. I
want them to see that we look like real
people.”
How to make people sec? How to show
them the real human beings inside the
stereotypes? There arc dozens of ways.
The ballot box. The classroom.
Television, art, literature, politics.
Billboards and documentaries, graffiti and
speeches. You can come out to your boss,
speak up about your cousin’s homophobic
joke; ask your minister to change the sexist
language in the liturgy.
A lot of possibilities. They do not
cancel each other out. On the contrary,
they overlap, gather texture and strength.
The private acts and public marches, the
tiny tentative steps and the huge bold ones
add up in the end. They add up to a
movement. Maybe even a parade.
I wrote last year that images alone can’t
educate, that you have to tweak some brain
cells in order to change opinions. I still
think that. We could ride a float in every
mainstream parade in America, from
Philadelphia to Pendleton, and that still
wouldn’t end gay-bashing crimes or win
health benefits for our partners.
But it wouldn’t be a waste of time,
either. Parades bring out tens of thousands
o f people, folks who will line the sidewalks
and spend hours just looking at French horn
players and Shriners, clowns and drill
teams. If w e’re there, they’ll look at us too.
Maybe for the first time.
Ellen Galloway and 29 other real people
rode through the rain last month to make a
point. After the float pulled away into the
damp night, you could almost hear a
crackle in the air. Could be the sound of
last year’s newsprint, crunched into a ball
and lobbed into the nearest trash can.
Could be the noise of minds working to
make connections.
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