It’s because it doesn’t take long for the floats to run together. And when it becomes hard to distinguish your favorite local gay-owned bar, which is maybe an active participant in gay life beyond the night scene, and is maybe owned by someone who uses his and his bar’s money and influence to contribute to charities and activism, and maybe feels like a legitimately homey space and maybe, you dare to suspect, even somehow cares about you beyond your patronage—when it becomes hard to tell this apart from Jewel-Osco, which you know has some kind of uncaringly solicitous purpose, it becomes hard to see this particular parade as distinct from the parade to which you’re subjected for most of your waking life, the parade of expertly-crafted marketing that wants to push on your most basic psychic parts to see if that’ll make you more likely to buy a Ford or vote Democrat.
We are all of us now conditioned to withdraw in the face of that kind of pushing, when we feel like someone is trying to retool our emotional clockwork to fit an agenda he won’t explain. It’s a necessary fact of survival, a neo-instinctive response to psychic danger. So what is imagined and described as a community is, here, actually subjected to a violent smashing-apart, to the experience of being broken into individual, solipsistic, withdrawn, defensive parts. Which experience doesn’t have to make the overall spectacle less fun, necessarily; it just makes it lonely fun.
It probably goes without saying, but it’s immensely sad to hit suddenly on the loneliness of the whole event; and it’s the special kind of sadness that comes with something like remembering, in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, that you’re enjoying a dead loved one’s favorite dish. It’s sad in a way that suddenly gives the fun things a vaguely maudlin inflection. Suddenly, the sex starts to look desperate, the glitter like a sinister attempt to blind you to an unpleasant reality, the energy manically faked, etcetera.
Part of the fun of an event like this, after all, is that it ostensibly provides an opportunity for being-part-of, for experiencing the self as part of something supra-personal, as plugged into something beyond the I’s four walls. It’s a community event; it’s the healthy kind of pride, the dignity kind, rather than the narcissistic before-a-fall kind, the latter of which is always lonely.
Creating a supra-personal experience, incidentally, seems to be at least part of the rationale for invoking things like Stonewall, things usually consigned to the ashcan of history, at what is otherwise a party. They take us out of ourselves. They can, and probably ought to, give the party some sort of rootedness; they keep it from being a series of exchanges between person and brewer or person and trick or person and ideology, and make it something about a people, or a past, or a similarly mushy and sentimental construction.
It’s perhaps better, in other words, to be a little sentimental about the whole experience than to be self-centered and safely schizophrenic about it.
The parade lasts a long while, but passes quickly: what would clock in at a little over three hours seems to take only one. The floats are gone; the transactions, psychic and otherwise, between crowd and advertiser and vendor and every other type of participant are now complete.
The crowd has begun to dissipate by the end of the event. A relative quiet descends, the same kind of awkward silence that usually settles in when people who aren’t quite sure when the party turned bad, or why they came in the first place, all simultaneously decide to get their coats and head for the door. This now is only the gap between the parade and the party, which will trickle and then flood into Boystown’s bars and then eventually back onto its streets. In the emptied sidewalks and gutters, all that’s left is garbage: empty bottles and cups, discarded beads and boas and flags, torn and dirtied scraps of streamers.
Modernist smartypants and melancholic Walter Benjamin described “the angel of history” as seeing, “where we perceive a chain of events. . . , one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” According to Benjamin, “the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”[7]
It’s still not really clear, by the end of the parade, what to think about it: whether to consider it a spectacle, and enough for being one; or a darkly ironic, self-negating, vaguely funereal political performance; or a lonely and desperate infomercial; or something else altogether. The space between the Pride parade and the Pride party doesn’t leave much time to survey the pile of wreckage, the fortieth annual such pile since a group of drag queens formed kick-lines and left a particularly memorable one in the Village. A fleet of City of Chicago street-sweepers has been waiting in the wings for the last float to pass. Within fifteen minutes of the moment it does, the debris has all been cleared away; and, before long, it’s as though nothing happened at all.
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[7] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257–8.
