New Post up on Velvet Park: Post-Pride Reflections on an Alternative June in NYC
June Retrospective: Marching Around Month Vs. The Radical Act of Being Happy
I think that my new post that Grace Moon (aka Grace ‘Balls to the Wall’ Moon) just posted on Velvet Park is one of the more personally satisfying things that I have written in a good long while. I had a really incredible month and I felt like I was living a very different Pride month than I ever have in the past. I was chastising myself for not writing more frequently about the various queer activities and events that I was attending, for myself and for my relatively new commitment to Velvet Park, a website I adore; but in the end, I realized that it was the perspective of the whole month, and looking at it through the very new lens of NY being a marriage equality state where things started to come together.
Pride month, particularly the parade, is one of those landmark, yearly rituals in many queers lives, and I can flip through the pages of my own history using the Pride parade as a benchmark. Years I was happier. Years I was less happy. Years I was a lesbian, years I was a dyke, etc. etc. But this year, I celebrated Pride month very differently and did not attend any formal Pride events. Instead, I focused on the non-nuclear, very unconventional family unit of friend-family that I have all around me in this utterly astounding city, and I was far more satisfied than any lip service I could have paid to the supposed advances that a homogenized, monetized, corporate American rainbow agenda where assimilation is seen as the road to engendering tolerance in the wider world.
If we are just like everyone else so that they tolerate us, then we are erasing the difference that push our collective social enlightenment forward. Anyway. So this post on Velvet Park is about taking a more localvore approach to queer community, Pride, and suggests that being a happy, non-assimilationist queer is an of itself a spiritually gratifying, highly political act.
You can read it and see picture of my friends and I dressed as The Red Tide at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade here:
June Retrospective: Marching Around Month Vs. The Radical Act of Being Happy
And read other things on Velvet Park and enjoy Grace Moon’s smiling face on Velvet Park! Where Dyke Culture is in Bloom! I am not being told or paid to promote the site, I just find that subtitle hilarious. I always think of bloomers and venus flytraps…
I think that my new post that Grace Moon (aka Grace ‘Balls to the Wall’ Moon) just posted on Velvet Park is one of the more personally satisfying things that I have written in a good long while. I had a really incredible month and I felt like I was living a very different Pride month than I ever have in the past. I was chastising myself for not writing more frequently about the various queer activities and events that I was attending, for myself and for my relatively new commitment to Velvet Park, a website I adore; but in the end, I realized that it was the perspective of the whole month, and looking at it through the very new lens of NY being a marriage equality state where things started to come together.
Pride month, particularly the parade, is one of those landmark, yearly rituals in many queers lives, and I can flip through the pages of my own history using the Pride parade as a benchmark. Years I was happier. Years I was less happy. Years I was a lesbian, years I was a dyke, etc. etc. But this year, I celebrated Pride month very differently and did not attend any formal Pride events. Instead, I focused on the non-nuclear, very unconventional family unit of friend-family that I have all around me in this utterly astounding city, and I was far more satisfied than any lip service I could have paid to the supposed advances that a homogenized, monetized, corporate American rainbow agenda where assimilation is seen as the road to engendering tolerance in the wider world.
If we are just like everyone else so that they tolerate us, then we are erasing the difference that push our collective social enlightenment forward. Anyway. So this post on Velvet Park is about taking a more localvore approach to queer community, Pride, and suggests that being a happy, non-assimilationist queer is an of itself a spiritually gratifying, highly political act.
You can read it and see picture of my friends and I dressed as The Red Tide at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade here:
June Retrospective: Marching Around Month Vs. The Radical Act of Being Happy
And read other things on Velvet Park and enjoy Grace Moon’s smiling face on Velvet Park! Where Dyke Culture is in Bloom! I am not being told or paid to promote the site, I just find that subtitle hilarious. I always think of bloomers and venus flytraps…