My first pride parade was AWESOME!
There are pictures of our group available here and here’s a video, you can see my marching group at about 2:15. We’re all the little people in green trailing after the bus.
As for the numbers break down:
4 trans women, 6 trans men, 1 child, and 11 assorted friends, family, and partners.
We also had two men from Assyria Syria (apparently!) randomly join our group. They were pretty cool.
Before the parade we had to have our placards inspected for Bad Politics, as defined by the New Mardi Gras committee. They had a little check list, and it flagged two placards. One was this one that has a small LGB and a large T, at the top of the placard and says “Homophobes hate crossgender Behaviour”, and the other was the same design with the caption “The T is not silent”. We were escalated right up to the top of the food chain, and eventually the head of operations for the day said we could keep the “T is not Silent” but the other one had to be cut in half. They don’t like the word ‘hate’ to be so close to the acronym ‘LGBT’.
It was kinda weird. It all worked out in the end, though we spent a good our or two feeling pretty pissed that they were getting up in our grill about those particular placards.
So what did YOU all do last weekend?
Dude, I think they were probably Syrians rather than Assyrians.
NO!
They like totally travelled 3000 years from the past to come to Mardi Gras!
Didn’t you see the way they were dressed? OBVIOUSLY not from a modern nation state.
Nice pictures (where are you?)! I enjoyed the video too. It made the pride parades in Dallas, Texas look puny. They were fun and all, just nothing so elaborate. It would have been nice to attend yours.
Saturday I went clothes shopping and Sunday we went to the Minnesota Science Museum. We’re not in Texas anymore, but we still have Big Macs.
I am this spunkalicious and tasty looking queer.
The science museum sounds like fun. And President Obama would be proud of your consumerist economy stimulation. Good work!
Ah! I thought that might be you, I just didn’t recall your having that sexy lip piercing.
Did you get new glasses? They’re cool.
Yep! Just doin’ my part. I’ll be doing it again tomorrow too.
I did get new glasses a few months ago! Also, my lip peircing has been there for a while, but I changed it from a stud to a ring and now everyone notices it.
I’m looking distinctly girlier than usual there cos I’m wearing make up, so I don’t blame anyone for not recognising me.
Good work comrade! I salute your spending. I think I might go out and stimulate the economy a bit today myself.
Just got back from stimulating the economy some more.
Hey, Ryan, did you say in one of your blogs that you welcome suggestions for topics to write about? My wheels have been spinning.
Yes, I do welcome suggestions! It might take me a little while to write something coherent about whatever-it-is, but I would get to it eventually.
I’m currently percolating a couple of ideas:
- How the middle-classes break the marxist ruling class vs working class dichotomy.
– How to be a stealth trans person, but still remain a useful part of the political landscape
– What is trans pride, and why is it important.
If your idea is different to any of those ideas, I will happily write about it!
Those sound interesting. I’ll look forward to reading them.
I’ll go ahead and email you my suggestion.
Hey there, just discovered your blog from… I dunno, somewhere. Anyway I really like it, so I was just wondering if it’s still alive or if it’s moved somewhere else or some such hey? Also the bunch of you look like you had fun! In other news, cool to see some stuff from Australia. I’m in NZ, practically neighbours and that