It's Saturday, June 28 - I'm going to get into trouble for writing this, but here goes:
Like many other big cities around the world, Paris is holding its Gay Pride parade today. As (bad) luck would have it, the phantasmagoria is stomping along right under my windows, having blasted its way up the Boulevard St. Germain, over the Ile St.-Louis, and on to the Place de la Bastille. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, take a look at your Paris guidebook.)
The decibels could shatter your eardrums. If it were "La Vie en Rose", I wouldn't mind so much, but it's techno and hard metal ... amplified. The floats are embellished with rainbow flags and rainbow people, and the banners proclaim kinship with every political, educational, social, and religious group imaginable. (Well, maybe not with Islam.)
Wait! -- what am I seeing? Male belly dancers from Lebanon, wearing headscarves.
Thousands of bystanders are joining in the commotion. There are bare-chested men and green-wigged women in Carnivalesque costumes, all scrambling to catch some of the free condoms that are being tossed away. By eight o'clock this evening, when the last reveler has passed, the streets will be littered with beer cans, broken bottles, paper trash and scraps of food. The sanitation department will be cleaning it up all day tomorrow.
I wonder miserably, as I pop another aspirin, Why doesn't it ever rain on this parade?
Before you label me as homophobic, let me assure you that some of my Best Friends, and people I've worked with, are lesbian or gay. I have always believed that however you can be happy -- without harming others -- go for it. But do you need to flaunt it?
The irony of the gay rights movement is that on the one hand, it demands that sexual differences be seen and accepted and legislated as normal, but on the other hand it portrays these variations in an exaggerated, ostentatious and "un-normal" way. It's self-contradictory.
It is also a form of propaganda, or proselytizing, which I find unreasonable. People in conventional male-female relationships are not parading their lifestyle. And yet, perhaps they should! They are a singularly silent majority who are losing some of the best words in the English language: gay, queer, pink, rainbow.
Perhaps we should simply revive the May Day festival of antiquity -- a wildly permissive bacchanal, where we all dance around a maypole (a decidedly phallic symbol) and spend the night making love to whomever and however we like.
And that's it for May 1st. The rest of the year, let's show a little discretion and tact: turn down the decibels and stop littering the streets.