i have been so busy this week. sorry i've been so quiet. i've been working overtime for my 2+ jobs, plus trying to get a newsletter out, and a variety of meetings, friends in town, and life in general. but i've been thinking about you! speaking of my newsletter, below is my latest column, which you may notice is slightly similar to something i wrote on here for you recently (but it is different, i promise):

"Freakin’ Out Tourists and the Normalcy of Our Lives"

I'm walking to work the other day, just passing the cable-car turn-around where all the tourists gather like pigeons around half-eaten bread, waiting for their turn to ride the infamous San Francisco treat, when I spot N. N is someone I dated very, very briefly a year ago. He's oh-so-cute and we hug and smile.

Then I stare into his beautiful eyes and I jokingly query, "Wanna freak out the tourists?" by which I mean kissing with passion and lips locked and tongues lashing, right in front of the flock of midwesterners lost in the big Gay city. But you knew that, didn’t you?

We smile. It's Pride in San Francisco, the city is rainbow draped and flags are flying, millions of Gay people are here or coming here for the weekend, and tourists are the voyeurs of americana, so it's safe to say we felt the power to freak these people out without repercussion. And they probably wouldn’t have been that freaked out anyway. We smile at each other. I grab his soul patch between my thumb and my forefinger as I dart off, smiling once again at the thought of us having any power at all, in a larger society as close-minded and troubled and discriminatory as it is.

I hearken back to my very first Pride parade in my hometown of Kansas City. I was an awkward skinny young thing in awe of people being openly Queer. Kansas City’s Pride at that time was small enough to be held in a tiny triangular park no bigger than our own City’s Duboce Park. But, somehow, even within that small group and that small space, on that day, at Pride, there was a slight glimpse of a newfound power—the power to freak people out. And with that power came smiles and laughter because for a brief shining moment we were able to let loose and just be.

The usual Kansas City tourist trolley would go rolling by the park and all of Pride’s celebrants would wave and yell “Hi! Welcome to Kansas City!” And I instantly realized we all did this because it was a time to be open and public, to have fun, to break out of the standard silence, and a chance to freak out the minds of the tourists by simply being Out. By our openness about who we were, by being in public, by simply existing without shame, by being happy and Proud, we were a ‘freak’ of the usual norm, and it was a time to revel in that. And I think this may be part of what drives our community’s celebration of camp, brazenness, and loudness.

Now, this year at San Francisco’s Pride, we changed the standards. Not many people are freaked out anymore by our wearing leather, baring breasts, or standing on 10-inch heels in makeup, Catholic habit, and little else. Our ultimate freak this year was for all to see the utter normalcy of our lives: to walk hand in hand, to hold aloft a real marriage license, to kiss the love of our life, to be as everyday-freakin’-normal as everybody else in this freakin’ society.

Our last and ultimate freak-out is the fact that the culmination of our lives is becoming as blasé and americana as everyone else’s and that’s freaks out them as much as it freaks me out sometimes. Because who would have believed we were so freakin’ normal after all?