Saturday: Capitol Hill Pride Festival

I suppose I could have posted a separate entry about Capitol Hill Pride Festival yesterday morning, but there just wasn't much time -- once I got up and got ready for the day and we got everything packed up that we wanted to bring with us downtown, it was time for Shobhit and me to go. So you get just a little bit about it here in today's entry about both Saturday and Sunday.

Incidentally, I realized today that the first year I went to this event was in 2009, and assuming that was the first year they did it, then this year would be its tenth anniversary. It's impetus was stupid and petty, borne of Broadway businesses pissed at Seattle Pride moving events that had unfortunately outgrown the space on that street to Fourth Avenue downtown and also to Seattle Center. But! It's now just a standard part of Pride Weekend, and basically helps make everyone happy: tons of people go there now, making it just about as crowded as regular Pride ever was when it was on Broadway, and it's an all-day event for the Saturday June before the Parade, when Pride Sunday is always the last Sunday of June. Now nestled firmly in between Trans Pride on the Friday of that same weekend, each year now yields official Pride events traditionally held on each of the three days of that weekend. (The Dyke March is also traditionally the Saturday night before Pride Sunday, which tends still to happen on Broadway -- this year walking straight through the festival booths at the north end of Broadway, and then continuing south as usual.)

In any case, Shobhit had a standard morning and afternoon shift on Saturday, finishing up at 4:30. I met up with Laney to walk the festival at noon, assuming we would hang out for a couple of hours -- and we wound up hanging out for four. After about three hours of walking back and forth, including to the "Family Pride" event going on at Cal Anderson Park, she suggested we get a cocktail at Rooster's. My budget is pretty tight right now but I went ahead with it anyway. It's Pride Weekend! And I didn't spend anything more yesterday, which is what people usually do. So, I had a semi-late lunch of tortilla chips with queso dip, and a margarita. It wasn't technically Happy Hour, but Laney regarded it as such, so I added the pretty great photo of us that I took to my ongoing Flickr set of Happy Hour with Laney photos.

I got plenty of free samples from booths, particularly the QFC booth that has a line with a bag they give you a bunch of shit to put into, which I knew would make Shobhit happy. Laney even gave me most of her snack samples. Good thing too, because when Shobhit and I returned later, after we had dinner at home, the festival was still going but many of the booths had shut down -- including QFC's.

So Shobhit and I did not spend nearly as much time there as Laney and I did. Easily less than an hour; walking there with him only yielded another 6 photos for the event's full photo set, now with all of 22 shots total. But whatever, it still gets him a point on the next Social Review, and that made him happy.

Sunday: Seattle Pride Parade

Oh, the irony! I literally told myself yesterday morning that I would be much more selective this year about what I would take photos of, in an effort to avoid having a photo set that was too large -- so much for that! I found way too many interesting things to take photos of. I have 170 photos I uploaded that were taken yesterday! And that excludes the probably forty or more that I deemed unacceptable when viewing them in iPhoto and so I discarded them. This is what digital photography does to you, I guess.

So is this the highest number of photos I have ever taken for Pride any given year? Honestly I think it might be. If you combine all three days of Pride 2018, or all five separate photo sets, you get a total of 221 shots over the three-day period from Friday to Sunday. Now, last year comes close, with more separate Pride events I attended in June than ever before (six, including the politicized Pride March earlier in the month, which was not repeated this year; and the Volunteer Park Pride Festival, which was repeated but we missed because we were in Yellowstone), thus totaling 212 Pride photos for 2018. Between the Pride Parade and subsequent PrideFest in 2017, though, I totaled 106 photos on just Pride Sunday last year, as compared to this year's 170.

--Hold on! This year is clearly the record-holder for photos at Seattle Pride, but it doesn't break the record for any Pride. I just double checked when we went to San Francisco Pride in 2006, and the five separate sets I made for that actually total 291 shots. That still beats this year's Seattle Pride by a good 70 photos. But! For specifically Pride Sunday, this year in Seattle still wins -- 170 shots as compared to 162 that Sunday in San Francisco 2006. The other days in this year's Pride Weekend yielded comparatively fewer photos.

Anyway! About that above shot. It can be hard to choose which representative shot to use for the parade photo set (which here contains 105 shots), but I thought that shot of a Starbucks drag queen wearing a balloon latte hat was apropos. Shobhit worked at Starbucks for a while last year, after all.

Speaking of which, though, I have to say that the parade feels weirdly, a little . . . less gay. I mean, don't get me wrong: given that feeling, it was still surprisingly easy to get plenty of photos of very gay things -- including a lot of hot guys in varying states of undress. The hot guys were easier to find everywhere but the parade, in places like the Capitol Hill Pride Festival and particularly PrideFest at Seattle Center after the parade. And I've spent plenty of time scoffing at years of complaints people have had about this, the "corporatization" of the Pride Parade -- my response has always been that it's a natural byproduct of the mainstreaming of gay culture. Through most of that, though, I feel like a much higher percentage of the parade still had a noticeable element of celebrating sexual deviance (so to speak) and sexual defiance: we're here, we're queer, we're sex positive. The floats featuring hot gogo boys dancing in their underwear are increasingly a thing of the past. Sure, a few did exist in this year's parade -- but they didn't become all that noticeable until countless contingents had already passed. Among my specific parade photos, the nude cyclists are 92 photos in (that's 70% of the way through); the "pups" contingent -- one of only two or three contingents I noticed with any overtly fetishistic theme, and there used to be countless -- 110 photos in (83% of the way through); and it's 127 photos in (96% through) before the once-standard float with dancing gogo boys is even first seen.

Now, I don't want to be misunderstood. I'm not saying the Pride Parade should be all sex, all the time -- not by any stretch. But neither do I think the decades-long message of body positivity and sex positivity should be completely neutered, and it sort of feels like it's going in that direction. This is of course a longstanding debate, between the gays who argue it should all be more "family friendly" to appease the mainstream straights who historically hated us, and the gays who argue it should be both sexual and much more overtly political rather than celebratory, something that exists as a means of fighting and pushing back against oppression -- exactly how it started in 1970 when it was a year after the Stonewall Riots.

The almost-but-not-quite dispiriting thing about watching the Pride Parade now is, with gay culture so firmly mainstreamed that, as of yet at least, not even the President Fuckwit Administration has re-politicized it, there is a decided lack of both politics and pointed sexuality. So what's left? A parade that feels like it's 80% contingent after contingent of people using their business to get a free commercial that runs through downtown in front of tens of thousands of people. It's just, brand after brand after brand.

And, well, I just have mixed feelings about that. I feel better when they make something about their business overtly queer -- such as, in the case of the above shot of Starbucks, a drag queen wearing a balloon latte hat. That's some old-school camp right there, something the Pride Parade would benefit from having a lot more of. And it's strange to see the parade lose so much of its politics, sex and camp. It renders it boring -- especially when the fucking thing lasts for four hours. I mean, shit. We can look at ads anywhere, any time of the year. Do something more creative than just walking through the parade with a banner of your logo.

I still had a good time. Shobhit and I stayed for most of the parade before moving on to Seattle Center -- the parade reached us at about 11:30, as we were so close to the north end of it at 4th and Vine; we left at 3:20. There was a bit more of the parade, and so maybe the Market Optical float that usually shows up with its own gaggle of hot gays was back there somewhere? I always loved that this one Capitol Hill business that wasn't even a gay club kept up with that tradition, and fear that even they are backing off from it. Far fewer of the Capitol Hill clubs do it anymore, after all, ever since the parade was moved downtown about a decade ago and so places like Neighbours and The Cuff and The Wildrose now put on their own street-closing events that keep business on Capitol Hill, and don't even bother with the Pride Parade anymore. R Place is consistently the one exception there, which I have always appreciated.

Sunday: Seattle PrideFest

Another minor irony: this full photo set has all of 19 shots, even though I have a total of 35 while there. It's just that 16 of them were of random hot guys, and they get their own dedicated photo set. Still, I got some pretty interesting pictures at PrideFest. Consider this one: spot the furry! I also got several shots at the International Fountain, as usual, because Shobhit had worn his swim trunks under his shorts and gone to get wet under the water, among the many other people in various states of undress. Shobhit almost tried to convince me not to go up to PrideFest at Seattle Center at all, but for me it's tradition to include that; even if we weren't there long, I didn't want to miss it. This added enough to our day, though, that we bagged our plan to see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom that evening and will see it either tonight or tomorrow night instead. I really needed the evening to process my massive number of photos anyway -- indeed, most of them, as usual, I've not had the time to caption. But I've got all of them tagged pretty adequately.

Saturday-Sunday: Random Hot Guys!

So last year the "Random Hot Guys" photo set had a record 35 photos. I guess I've gotten over the few years of hangups I've had regarding ogling hot younger guys, because this year's photo set beat that record by 15 -- at a total of 50 shots! I had no qualms this year with taking pictures of any and all hot guys -- even ones that were only somewhat hot. I mean, "hot" is in the eye of the beholder anyway. And in some cases they just looked interesting, for whatever reason. Although pretty much all the nude cyclists I got photos of were pretty damn hot. That said, I would also say that these photo sets now, in contrast to those I made a decade or more ago, actually have a much greater age diversity in them. They do include some hot guys who are clearly older, and not just twinks. It's just that most of the guys in the parade or at Pride events walking around in briefs are younger. They're all hot regardless of age, though. At least the ones I took pictures of are.

[posted 12:29 pm]