My favorite lesbians

I went with Sophie and Melissa to the NYC Pride parade last weekend - it was an especially auspicious year for this celebration because it was the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Seeing the veterans of Stonewall riding by on a float was at once heartening and sad. Many are now old men, and they still can't legally marry or live entirely free of fear that they could be the victims of anti-gay violence - even on some of the streets of liberal New York.

I imagine their stories are hard for people of Melissa and Sophie's generation to grasp, though they and the other younger people in the crowd absolutely recognize the contribution of these gay elders and they cheered them as they went by - they are heroes to all of their gay "children" and "grandchildren." And to people like me as well - parents of young men and women who are just trying to get on in the world and live their lives as free Americans. Stonewall is Selma.

This week's New Yorker quoted an article called "The Homosexual in America" that was published in 1966 in Time magazine: "[Homosexuality] is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness."

Back in those days, when I was in high school, I read Time voraciously. It was a sort of pop culture Bible to a certain people of my generation, and I am horrified to think that I was reading that sort of crap.

Times change, but not that much in some ways. I will never forget stopping with Sophie in Laramie, Wyoming, when we drove cross-country from Seattle to Poughkeepsie in 2003. It was just a few years after the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, and we pulled over to take some pictures of one of those lonesome stretches of fence that go for on for miles in that part of the west. Suddenly, Sophie started to cry -- and I knew right away what she was thinking. This was much like the spot where Matthew had been tied to a fence, beaten, and left to die. We both realized the horrifying implication -- that you could be targeted for violence simply because you were gay, plain and simple.

Now, 40 years after Stonewall and 11 years after Matthew Shepard, a parade seems a slight way to recognize the veterans of the struggle. But it does provide a moment of solidarity, and a chance to remind people of the gay rights issues that are critically important right now -- the fight for marriage equality and the struggle to get rid of the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't ask, don't tell.

Bare butts and drag may seem frivolous, but in a way that's what it's all about - the freedom to pursue your own happiness. See more pictures here.