Member-only story
Still Riding the Rainbow
Pictured here was my second or perhaps third gay pride parade, which I remember as particularly fun and joyful — even if the Times still used “homosexual” instead of “gay.” While marching, my friend Patrick and I fell in with some cute men who invited us back to their place for margaritas, but there was oddly no whiff of potential sex in the air. One of the guys simply slipped “The Wizard of Oz” into the VCR, and, pleasantly stoned (this was back when pot wasn’t stupidly strong), I felt like I was watching the movie for the first time. It was such a perfect (if accidental) metaphor for the emergence of gay life to come in the post-war years. Like Judy, gays went from a black and white world to a color one. Unlike Judy, we never wanted to go home again. Nor could. That’s the thing about losing your innocence. You never get it back.
I remember thinking it was the perfect day. And now, looking at that date, I realize it was.
This article is dated June 29th 1981. Four days later, on July 3, 1981 we read that first headline: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.”
By December of that year, we knew “GRID” was here to say, albeit soon enough with a new acronym.
Although I’d been a practiced denizen of the pleasures and pitfalls of Manhattan in the late-70s, my real loss of innocence came with the gradual realization that the hunt for…
