Let me begin with a little love letter to my town, Northampton, Massachusetts a couple of days after its 29th Pride March. This year’s was the largest ever, with estimates around 15,000. The other big civic event in our town each year is the Hot Chocolate Run to benefit Safe Passage, an agency that focuses upon domestic violence. That duo of grand civic events right there makes me want to draw a big old heart for this town.
For those of you from elsewhere, there are not 15,000 gay people marching and rallying on the first Saturday in May; everyone’s marching and rallying and cheering on the marchers and enjoying a big festival downtown. That’s the thing: this event isn’t an us/them (who’s us and who’s them?) affair whatsoever. It’s become a celebration of a simple message: Be who you are. Love the one you love. Equal treatment shall be yours. No, equal treatment shall be ours.
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It’s a far cry from the early years of Northampton Pride, when the protesters nearly outnumbered the participants and the protesters were, in my memory at least, menacing. These days, the media coverage is as upbeat as the event itself, as in colorful and supportive, depicting a celebration filled with humor and fun and children—and this year, many dogs and even a couple of horses; Dakin Animal Shelter marched touting a message of animals’ support for same-sex adoption; a therapeutic horse farm also marched.
On Saturday, I so enjoyed this visual: first, the dykes on bikes (that would be motorcycles) revved up and commenced the parade. Next up, a long and varied array of area churches marched. Add in a very impressive number of high schools and elementary schools, along with the colleges, and of course, the politicians. Besides the animals, there were hospital employees, raging grannies, and presumably solely for commercial purposes, one of the airport’s valet parking places (complete with shuttle bus and Barker the Parker mascot).
Here’s our town: the Pride March and the Hot Chocolate Run, the dykes on bikes and the churches in that order.
As a parent, whether you march or watch, you are gifted this incredible opportunity each year to underscore the message that while family constellation matters little, love matters all. You actually don’t have to tell your kids this, because the pictures are worth thousands upon thousands of words (and not simply family constellation; my two year-old was mesmerized—and who wouldn’t be—by the drag queens dancing on the Diva’s nightclub float). While it takes more than one Saturday per year to ensure that love-makes-a-family message sinks in, we are surely fortunate that this is a message we get to live day in and day out. The Pride March is more icing on the cake than manna (although it’s that, too, and of course provides the annual opportunity for a Purple Pride ice cream cone).
I most certainly loved that my son’s sixth grade teacher, Tom Weiner, invited his students to march together with him (and the kids made a banner during recess). He’s quoted in the Springfield paper about how he invites members of his class to march with him. Other years, a handful of students have joined him. This year, he had 14 out of 20. What can I say? This year, he’s got a very cool crew of sixth graders.
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A wonderful annual Pride March—or for that matter, living in a place that has moved far past tolerance to celebration—isn’t enough for parents (or this parent) to feel the job’s done. It’s easy at age five or seven to know deep in your heart that love makes a family. You might know that at 14 or 16, too, yet that knowledge competes with general confusion (substitute these words for confusion: hormones, peer pressure, and media, just for starters). So, what seems easy and breezy for a pre-pubescent child to grasp probably bears some serious repeating and some affirmation about celebrating all when so many more “things” and feelings are occurring so much closer to you.
To grow up in a place where those messages are commonplace and cross-generational and affirmed by the fact that having a lesbian mayor isn’t even a worthy point for the (gay) opposition to use against her in a campaign doesn’t exactly prepare you live elsewhere (save for, perhaps, parts of New York and San Francisco).
So, as my older kids get older, it’s not so much that I have to prepare them for the reality of other people and places’ realities, it’s more that I should try to help them not judge other people and places’ lack of ease. I want them to feel prepared to help create ease wherever they venture in the world, to move others from intolerance to tolerance and from tolerance to celebration. Frankly, I don’t know how to do that. I’m without a blueprint, or even all that many ideas. The conversations in our family continue. All we can do is keep talking, even about people’s lack of openness.
