I graduated from gay school

"It's the march of the gay parade!" -Of Montreal

Maria, Filipa and I went to see the night parade down past the Gay Village last night. I had seen the gay pride when it was during the day. I have the pictures somewhere, taken in 2000 with my dad.

Honestly, I enjoyed it more then. Maybe because it was my first time. Who knows. What I do know is that too much of this parade was just people walking down the street. "Hi, my name is John, I'm a gay parent", I DON'T CARE! ENTERTAIN ME!

My favourites are always the scantily-clad men and, of course, the show-stoppers are the drag queens. Mado's float was a good finish. But this year, even Gayrobics, who I've seen in loincloths in the past, were wearing shorts and t-shirts and looking like another random assortment of people walking down the street. ENTERTAIN ME!

The positive: the Shania-Twain-square-dancing-cowboys; all floats with good looking guys in speedos; the tall balloon people with smiley faces wooshing over the crowd; the butterfly costumes; the how-insane-are-you-in-real-life fire-breathers; the 45-year-old tattooed chunky biker dudes with cut-out ass chaps, oh yeah!; obviously, the drag-queens.

The worst: it got so bad with the random people walking past us, that there were even 2 men just, holding their water bottles, talking to EACH OTHER, in the middle of the parade. Kick those people out. I could have gone to bed earlier if I didn't have to put up with crap like that.

Also, we got in a fight. We arrived when there were already 3 rows of people on each side of the street so after much deliberation, we finally got the nerve to bust through and find a place to sit on the street (to avoid blocking the people we had just busted in front of). To find an un-taken spot, though, we had to walk a ways. We sat in a clearing and were immediately told to shove off by some stupid man. "We were here first", he said in French. "We're not blocking you", I replied. After more of this, we decided the only policy was to ignore him. The parade hadn't started yet and he decided that since he probably couldn't hit us, he would stand in front of us and keep talking about it. We kept ignoring him. I mean, I could still see through his legs so who cares? He went to talk to a parade "official" (a 15-year old boy telling people to keep behind a certain point) but got nowhere.

"These girls are deaf", he said. At some point he said something to Maria who replied in English "I don't speak French". "Oh, you don't speak French! Where are you from? Oh, Venezuela, and you? and you? Oh, I want to learn Spanish. Don't be angry at me! I didn't know you didn't speak French." And from THEN on, he was our beeeest friend.

Crazy Quebecer. He even grabbed some graduation hats that were tossed in the air by the Grad Dance float and gave them to us (ergo my graduation from gay school). He also got me a program. My theory is the real meanie behind the scenes was his mother. Your typical Quebec granny, with white hair that's obviously just been taken out of rollers, in BOOTS, and with religious paraphernalia hanging from her purse. She had it out with him over how much beer he'd drunk. She was in the front lines (in front of us, as soon as the parade started), constantly being asked to step back by the cops.

At the end of the parade 2 slightly tipsy guys -German? Nederlanders?- came up to us and very slowly asked if we were students! We had our grad caps on. That was probably the most fun we had. After we explained where the hats were from "Ah! Comprendo! Je comprends! Capiche!" and off they went in a drunken hug, following the wake of the gay parade.