Happy Pride!
June 30th, 2010 at 10:29 pm ET
I didn’t really celebrate NYC Pride this year — I was on a train coming back from Baltimore — but I did have the experience of being on the Newark PATH platform on Sunday afternoon as people massed for the trip into the city. And what a festive, jostling mass it was.
In a train like that, you’re reminded of just how wide the definition of the word “gay” has to stretch in order to encompass all of us. At least once a year, people turn out and claim the label who might not fall into the neat Chelsea (or Astoria) or Park Slope (or Red Hook) categories that come first to mind. Even in our homogenized, corporatized, cupcakes-and-Carrie-Bradshaw New York, there’s some diversity left.
Thank God for diversity — not the politically correct one-child-of-every-hue-on-the-cover variety, but the actual festive, jostling reality of America, gay and ungay and everything in between. We would be less than we are if any of the pieces were missing.
And thank God for the generations that came before mine, who marched angrily and proudly in drag and leather chaps (and swept me along with them at the tail end of things, to stand up to LA police on horseback and to CHP officers in Sacramento on the Capitol steps in 1991 to yell “Shame!” at Pete Wilson) so that my boyfriend and I could spend Gay Pride 2010 walking along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan not really thinking about gay rights at all. It’s not over — it never is — but wow. The social changes I’ve seen in the past thirty years go beyond what I ever would have imagined in 1980.
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Rich Mintz blogs on online fundraising and social media, American history and culture, bicycling and urbanism, food, technology, and other topics. Professionally, he's an expert in fundraising, constituency development, and social media for nonprofits, cultural organizations, cause-related marketers, and corporations. He is based in New York, where he serves as Vice President, Strategy, for 
