It's funny how aging can strip away your cynicism. it seems counterintuitive, in a way: I spent my young adulthood massively cynical, through pretty much all of college and a good few years after. I never would have expected then that life experience would grant me a more mature look at life than just looking at my fate as a lifetime of beat downs.
To be fair, I had some experiences in my youth that would naturally make a person cynical, from the decades-long effects of being molested as a child, to the homophobia of my religious upbringing, in tandem with getting bullied to such a degree in middle school and high school that I completely withdrew into myself. It certainly didn't help matters that, my very first Pride Parade, on Broadway here in Seattle
in June of 1998, a rather creepy guy offered to pay me $100 to "make love" to me. I was still a virgin, had not yet made any friends in Seattle (I literally moved here from Pullman that very month), and was still deeply sexually repressed.
What a difference 25 years makes, huh?
Pride means something so deeply positive to me now, I never, ever miss it. So many more people the age I was in 1998, and in many cases far younger even than that, experience it in a way I could not have dreamed of then. It is precisely because of this that Pride, even after all these years, still has the power to move me.
So, let's be clear: Tacoma is not my favorite city. It never has been and it never will be, but, it's fine. It's been given short shrift unfairly by many people over the years, including me, although I do encounter a lot more people these days who not only love it, but insist it's better than Seattle. (That's an insane take, but whatever. I still say: if you love the city you live in, then I love that for you!)
Tacoma's much smaller-scale Pride Festival, which I checked out for the first time ever today, is a clear reflection of this. Any other city in the Puget Sound region would be nuts to hold a separate, local Pride event on the same weekend as Seattle Pride, when Seattle Pride attracts people from all over the state, but especially all over the state west of the Cascade Mountains. So, these other, smaller cities—you might call them "satellite cities," although some of them might resent that—have to hold their own Pride events, should they have them at all, on a different date. Oympia held theirs on Saturday, July 1, the next weekend after Seattle Pride. The Saturday after
that brings us to today, when Tacoma held their Pride Festival.
There was no Pride Parade. It was just the equivalent of five or six blocks of downtown Tacoma blocked off, lined with vendor booths of all sorts (a few of which had also been at multiple Seattle Pride festival events), and a single main stage.
Tracy had planned to come with her sister, and possibly meet up with me, but Cindy was apparently not feeling well so they never made it. I texted Danielle yesterday to see if she'd have any interest but she wanted a chill weekend after returning from a trip to Canada last weekend. Shobhit wanted to spend some time today campaigning. I even texted Gabriel to tell him I would be relatively close to his house, really not expecting him to meet up regardless of what he was doing, but he did text back to say he and Lea were driving back from Eugene, Oregon. I took a Sound Transit bus there and back, and I spent the afternoon there by myself.
I'm really glad I went. And I'm starting to get used to these roughly 70-minute bus rides to Tacoma; to me it's an easy ride. Having the patience for long bus rides is never an issue for me.
What I appreciated about Tacoma Pride was less about what it had to offer, which was essentially the exact same things all the Seattle Pride events had to offer and on a smaller scale, but who they had to offer it to. This was a local Pride event, for the local citizenry, and I could feel in the crowd that it was something they appreciated. People may come from far and wide to Seattle Pride, but a lot more people are unable to, for whatever reason, and here was something for Tacomans in their own city.
And it was pretty large-scale, actually, in context: they
expected about 20,000 attendees today, which amounts to a stunning 9% of the population of Tacoma proper. Granted, if the "
nearly 300,000 people" estimate at the Seattle Pride Parade is accurate, then
that amounts to 40% of the population of Seattle proper—and 7.5% of the metropolitan Seattle area—which, incidentally, includes Tacoma. Seattle proper has three and a half times the population of Tacoma proper, though, so these comparisons are unfair. In the context of Tacoma itself, having the equivalent of nearly 1 in 10 of the city's population at this event strikes me as kind of extraordinary.
And, just as happens often when I am at Seattle Pride, I looked around, and found myself at one point moved nearly to tears. Just seeing all these people, congregated in a space where they could express the entirety of their true selves, it always gets to me.
There was something different about the crowd there, too. It's not that they were "not as hot" as so many who come to Seattle Pride—although I would certainly characterize this crowd as far more modest, the one guy
walking around in nothing but a cock sock notwithstanding. The average festival-goer here had more clothes on, with just a few exceptions. Plus, they just looked, on average, far more like regular people. Not a lot of stunningly fit bodies adhering to any unrealistic beauty standards. In fact a good few exposed some flesh with a sense of body positivity I continue to struggle working toward. I'm a lot closer than I used to be, at least.
Perhaps more significantly, I was genuinely more entertained by the live entertainment at this event than I had been at any of the Seattle Pride events—none of which were bad, mind you. I just enjoyed these ones more, from the drag queen performances ("Tina Turner" was especially memorable) to a live act I enjoyed so much I stuck around or her entire set, which must have been about five songs. She was a young queer Black woman from Montreal named
Magi Merlin. I liked every one of her songs so much, I later found her latest EP on Apple Music and listened to them all twice over on the bus ride home.
I did find myself wondering how the budgeting for this sort of thing works. Booking local talent is one thing, but should I assume Tacoma Pride paid for Magi Merlin, along with her drummer and bass player, to fly out all the way from Montreal?
Plus actually pay them for the gig? How much would that have come to, I wonder? I would assume a lot. However they managed it, I'm glad they did. It's very rare that I feel like I've actually discovered a new artist, especially at my age now.
I spent a good amount of time at that stage. A
Drag Queen Story Time was just ending when I arrived, shortly after 12:30. I later saw three different drag queen lip sync performances—of the sort that is actually steeped in queer history, and which you see far less of at Seattle Pride as that gets big enough to book exclusively actual live acts. I think Seattle could do with more of this stuff. I'm sure I could still find it at plenty of dive gay bars, which I spend very little time at, so there's that.
There were probably more live acts, but after a text exchange in which I learned Tracy and her sister weren't coming after all, I wound up catching the 3:45 bus back—I was there a solid three hours. Still, all of it was by myself, and I still never got bored. Although it's not my preference, I remain confident I can spend three days alone in Minneapolis next month and easily make the most of it and have a good time. Or, maybe I can pull the trick Ivan often seems to manage and find some guy on Grindr to volunteer for showing me around. Ivan is much younger and better looking than I am, though, so that makes a difference. I actually did open Grindr briefly today while I was in Tacoma, and the only communication I got was from a guy who said he was in Vancouver. What the hell?
Oh, I nearly forgot: I actually did meet a guy today, who was also going to Tacoma Pride, but he was on the bus going down there. I have a feeling the biggest reason he came to ask if he could sit next to me was because he had a face mask on and I was literally the only other person on the bus with one on. I learned a fair amount about him on the bus ride, when I had hoped to get some reading done of my library book, but it was that very book that got him starting to chat with me: when he was around 10 years old he had a great grandmother who lived through the era of the 1918 pandemic and she had told him a bit about what it was like being a child in America at the time. Then, as the conversation progressed, I learned that his name is Glen, he's 35, and he works from home remotely as a manager for resellers on Amazon.
He was meeting several friends who live in Tacoma, and he got off at the Tacoma Dome Station. He said, "It was nice getting to know you" before he got off the bus.
Just as that was happening, another guy waiting to get off at the back door, right in front of the seat I was sitting in, recognized me. He was the receptionist at City Cat vet, where we take our cats for their check-ups and where Shobhit has returned multiple times for his campaigning. I never would have recognized the guy; this was the first time I had ever seen
him with
no face mask on, and I'd have never known he had a beard. Once I knew who he was, though, I immediately recognized the distinctive speech patterns he has, which kind of just stop short of being stilted. He told me the campaign sign Shobhit left there got stolen, which he felt really bad about.
I had no chats on the way home after I was done there, though, which was just as well because I was editing photos on my phone while listening to Magi Merlin.
[posted 10:23 pm]
