Saturday in the Park
After sleeping all morning, we pick up Robert and his date and head for Piedmont Park. “The perfect locale for the Gay Pride festival,” Robert says. “Men used to get blow jobs in the bushes.”
A brief but heavy afternoon rain leaves the pavement feeling sticky and the air smelling of asphalt. We follow a synthesized drum beat deeper into the park, passing increasinly larger clusters of portable toilets. A lesbian couple, walking a sleek greyhound on a long leash, passes us and nods. A vendor offers us tasteless pellets of Dippin’ Dots — “the ice cream of the future.” We spot our first gay male couple just before we enter the market area: two tanned man, each wearing nothing more than a lace girdle and high-tops.
The festival is part Halloween carnival, part Woodstock. In the market, the saturated ground sucks at my new Reeboks with each step I take. Most vendors, discouraged by rain, are already disassembling their booths and shrouding their wares with sheets of muddy plastic. A few others — optimists, perhaps — continue to sit behind stacks of leather goods and handmade pottery.
While browsing, one man approaches us and offers to “give away” a coffee table identical to one I have in my apartment for three times what I paid for it. Six nearby booths sell identical novelty tee shirts, cheap plastic rainbow flags, and leather keychains stenciled with the symbols for various gay subcultures. Five other vendors hawk copper jewelry, surplus Home Interiors wall hangings, and wooden yard ornaments to the increasingly dirty and humidity-blunted crowd.
We pick our way through a swampy patch of unused land to the entertainment pavillion. A few dozen people stand with their arms folded, dressed for a late-sixties anti-war demonstration. One drunken man, shirtless and bearded, stands at the foot of a large black stage, stomping and clapping.
Everyone else pretty much ignores the singer, who, accompanied by a tiny Cassio keyboard, sings about being a “sports dyke” who masturbates with a softball bat. She offers her cassettes, featuring “this and other original songs” — for $19.95.
We wander the same path a second time — entrance, vendos, stage — looking for something we must have miseed. As we leave, a handsome vendor, packing his wares, calls us over. “Did you get registered and counted?” he asks.
“Registered and counted?” we ask. “What do you mean?”
“Very important,” the young man says. “No other sure-fire way to document the number of people here.” He bends over and pulls out a rain-soaked cardboard box. Cheap rainbow-colored armbands, each emblazoned with the phrase “1993 March on Washington,” lie inside. “You gotta get an arm band. We keep track of ’em. Registers and counts you. You need to do your part. Just five bucks, man.”
Clyde makes a face and shakes his head. “I have March on Washington armbands I got at the March on Washington.”
The vendor snatches his box away. “Don’t be counted, then.”
As we leave the park, we watch for people wearing rainbow armbands. We see only one — the vendor, carrying several boxes of them back to his car.
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