Lavender Starsnip/Page 1/May 1973

GAY PRIDE.. WHY?

Well, why not? Every time you look up, someone is celebrating something about themselves.

The Irish take over America on St. Patrick's Day (in Columbus, Ohio, the centerline of the street down which the traditional parade passes is striped in green). On Columbus Day, the Italians are out in full force laying wreaths on the statues of the socalled Discoverer of AmeriCO. Afro-Americans comemorate the struggle, achievements and aspirations of their people during what in some quarters is known as Negro History Week and in others Black Unity Week. In Moscow (Russia, not Idaho), even the department stores close in honor of Women's Day.

And Christmas, in case you've never looked at it this way, is just Christians celebrating their Christianity.

So why shouldn't Gays celebrate their Gayness?

But, yes, can hear some saying, what have we faggots and dykes got to celebrate? Milleniums of suffering and oppression? Rebuke, scorn, and persecution from every corner of society? Acres of frustrated longings and twisted souls? The bars, the baths, the parks, the tearooms, the movie galleries, 42nd

St. New York?

Or are we going to get into that tired old trip of great gays in history. You know, the Sappho-Michelangelo-da Vinci-Walt WhitmanGertrude Stein-and maybe even George Washington-were50-gay-is-good baloney?

Once again I reply, well, why not?

We can be as proud of our traditional social institutions as the Jews are of Buchenwald or Dachau, because whatever else you may think of them, they do reflect a will to survive in the face of an inexorable, inhuman oppressor. I mean we can be proud, for example, that, however small the amount, there is some love in a gay bar: given the conditions we have been, there really shouldn't be any.

We can be proud of the poets and the painters and all our other sister and brother artists, for they have expressed some of the highest affirmations of the human spirit--affirmations arising out of their Gayness.

But Gay Pride is more than heritage hunting. It encompasses two very important concepts.

One, it brings Gays and Gayness out into the open, where they should be. As gay people, we suffer from invisibility. An invisibility that conventional society uses to keep us where

they want us -hidden, alienated, frightened. They don't want us out in the open because then they would have to really deal with us instead of pretending that ve just don't exist.

They're like my mother, who often says to me, "I don't care what you are, I Just don't see why you have to broadcast it." Well, Mom and all you others of like persuasion (and, unfortunately, this includes many of our own sisters and brothers), if heterosexuality can be broadcast from every TV station, radio, book cover, magazine, and record album, homosexuality has a place there, too. For like it or not, it is as equally a valid (if not more so) lifestyle as any other.

That's one: Gay Pride brings us out. The other is it brings us together.

Eating, rapping, learning, dancing, marching, singing, loving. We are surrounded by sisters and brothers from all over and the world we're in is suddenly a vision, a lovely and lovingly filled vision of lavender.

All of us, every mortal day of our mortal existence, are forced to relate most of the time within a straight context. That's another way of saying the world is straight-dominated. And after a while, that can really get to you. The only time we normally get out of it is when we're at our bars or our rap sessions or our meetings. But that's not all that frequent.

Gay Pride Week offers us an almost continuous festival of life--gay life.

A spirit builds within us, goes out and joins with others. A higher spirit is born. The feeling in ecstatic. You can feed off of it for a long, long time. Some of us get so motivated that afterwards we try to create conditions that will give us that same feeling 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for the rest of time.

But more than anything, I believe, Gay Pride Week is Just about the highest form of celebration there is. It's not your National Dental Health Week or your Miss America Pageant or your Crusade for Christ. It celebrates Being without looking for an excuse. It says we are beautiful, wonderful, scintillating, living beings, so let's get together and have a party.

And so we do. Now it is & Veek. Soon it may be a month, some time later, perhaps, a year. Eventually, we will be doing what we ought to be doing right this minute: making every day a celebration of our gayness.

David Treadwell