“What good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like.”

― Jess C. Scott, New Order

 

Parade Ready

 

“Hold Still!” my roommate, Mario, shouted.  He had a martini in one hand and a paintbrush dipped in yellow paint in the other.

It was nine in the morning. We were having a party.

I was his canvas. I view bodies as works of art, canvasses waiting to be explored. 

I was topless.

Various party-goers would view my body and comment on Mario’s handiwork.

I held still while he went to work on his masterpiece.

“And... done!” he announced.

 I looked down to see my belly transformed into a field of green with a singular yellow flower stemming from my nether regions.

 “A crooked daisy,” I said. “That’s hardly high art.”

 “Yeah, well the canvas was all wobbly,” he said. “We need to make you parade ready.”

 

There was only one parade. The months leading up to it were like the months leading up to Christmas.  Meals were planned. Outfits picked out. Drink lists rechecked.

The official San Francisco LESBIAN GAY BISEXUAL TRANSGENDER PRIDE parade was the social highlight of our year. Our parade began in the 1970s to commemorate the Stonewall Riots. Then, Harvey Milk used it as a platform to encourage Jimmy Carter to defend gay rights. Willy Brown encouraged voters to oppose a bill allowing school districts to fire queer teachers. It had grown to a colossal display of love and freedom of expression. It was weird. It was extravagant. It was defiant in its identity. It was my favorite day of the year, more so than Christmas. And I desperately needed a date to it.

Mario filled my belly button with thick white paint.

“That will never dry!” I said.

“So? Go ask one of the cute new girls to blow on it.”

“That’s my pickup line?” I asked. “Please blow on my bellybutton?”

In our circle, asking someone to the parade was like asking someone to prom.  There was a lot of looking down and shuffling of feet and sweaty palms.

Mario waved his paintbrush. “You may get lucky,” he said. “Maybe one of them rides a motorcycle.”

I had always wanted to be in the parade. Not just in the parade.  I had always wanted to ride with Dykes on Bikes. Visions of my long hair blowing in the breeze. Visions of wrapping my arms around a woman’s waist, my naked (and painted) breasts pushing into her leather jacket. Visions of my daisies vibrating. Vibrating! With the pulse of the motorcycles, the pulse of the parade. Since I had no girlfriend, and no one to wrap my arms around, I entertained the thought of buying a motorcycle on my own.

“You can’t even ride a bicycle!” Mario had said.  “You fall down when you walk.”

“Imagine,” he said, “when you tip the motorcycle over, and you will tip it over. You are never exactly dressed for a motorcycle accident.”  I thought of road rash in sensitive spots and winced.

“Also,” he said, “you could hit one of the onlookers.”

He was correct. The official SF Dykes on Bikes website has this to say about the onlookers: “Please ride slowly because pedestrians and photographers love the SF Dykes on Bikes®, and for some reason they like to stand in the road.  Don't hit one of them; it will make for a bad day.”

 

Some say that in San Francisco, Halloween is redundant. This rings true.  It was the early 1990s, and tattoos and body piercings, still a rare commodity in most of the nation, were the norm here. On our block we had one man who dressed as Batman…every day.  The diversity was glorious.  I was 23 years old. I went topless on the weekends. I wore body paint. A lot of body paint. 

While Halloween might be redundant, the gay pride parade was not. In our apartment, we just called it “gay day.”  

Each year, there was a lot of hope riding on the parade. There were pre-parade parties, and pre-pre-parade parties.  Today the parade has many more rules, such as rules governing throwing items from floats. But in the early nineties, when the parade was less universal, as it marched past people holding up signs proclaiming God Hates Fags, the spirit, if not the actual official rules, were a bit freer. From the floats people threw condoms and candy, and Mario would exclaim, “ooh a purple one!” and I never knew whether he referred to a condom or a piece of candy.

My two favorite parade contingents were Dykes on Bikes and PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gay) carrying signs exclaiming, My gay son makes me proud or My gay daughter is awesome.  Any parade where parents hold signs announcing how proud they are of their children is not redundant. As a young woman beginning to explore my identity, I was proud. Proud of my chosen lifestyle, proud that I could walk down the street half naked, in beaming daylight, holding the hand of anyone I chose.

 

The 1993 parade preparations at our Potrero Hill home were in full swing. Mario put down his martini and studied his canvas.   

 I looked down at my now colorful left breast. A bright yellow daisy had formed next to the daisy on my right breast.

Sporting three lopsided daisies on my nude torso, I felt like a Monet painting…if Monet took peyote.

“It’s so crooked!” I told Mario.

“Well, my canvas is crooked,” he said, “Seriously, your left breast is much bigger than the right. He completed his masterpiece by swirling a white dot onto my nipple.

“You need to let that dry,” he said. “Go mingle. Try the pickup line again.”

“Really?” I asked. “Asking will you blow on my nipple is worse than will you blow on my belly button.”

“You look parade-ready to me,” he said.

Actually, it was nowhere near parade time. The official parade started in 23 hours… give or take a few martinis. This, however, was parade eve. We affectionately referred to it as “gay eve,” and it is now known as Pink Saturday.

I could not let Pink Saturday go to waste. I thought of my deep desire to mount a motorcycle, to feel the hum and power. I flirted at the party for hours, looking for girls who rode bikes. Does she look like she owns a motorcycle? 

Then I saw the girl from the pub. We had had a few dates. Her name was Sam, and, like me, she was from the South, a transplant. Sam was cute, shorter than me, which was unusual, and had that chiseled James Dean thing going. At that time in my life, I was very new to romantic interactions. So there was quite a bit of jostling in bed, a lot of awkward moments. Oops, sorry, damn, was that your eye, ouch, that’s my hair type of moments.  Sometimes new lovers don’t quite gel in bed, and she zings while I zang. Years later I ended up having a girlfriend break my nose with her knee. Sex is messy!

Rumor had it that Sam now had a serious girlfriend.

“Hey,” she drawled into my ear. “I like your fancy artwork.” Her arm rested lazily around my shoulder, her fingertips brushing my daisy.

“Say,” I began. “You don’t own a motorcycle, do you?”

“I’m afraid not, Sugar,” she said, and I removed her hand from my flower.

 

That evening, Mario and I went to see a gay comedy fest, and that’s where I met Jill.

She was not the headliner, but she was magnificent.  I waited for her outside, biting my nails.

She came out with a friend, whom she introduced as Miss Priscilla. 

“My compliments to the artist,” Miss Priscilla said, surveying my daisies.

“My compliments to the canvas,” Jill said, surveying my daises… with an appreciative eye.

 

If you were to ask me for the top five traits I seek in a woman or a man as a partner, I would say they are funny, funny, funny, funny, and sexy. I had dated one female comedienne before, and the relationship was great.  Since then, I had been hanging out at comedy clubs for years… trolling.

“So,” I said to Jill. “You are very funny. I like that in a woman.”

“And you,” she said, “are very naked. I like that in a woman.

I wondered if she rode a motorcycle.

“Do you think she will ask you?” Mario whispered, when our now-group-of-three was desperately trying to hail a cab back to Pot Hill. 

And that night, as Jill and I shared wine in my bedroom in that pre-sex-shyness-moment, she did ask me to the parade. I told her of my dream of being a dyke (more specifically, on a bike) of the need to govern something that potent, and she kissed me for the first time. Jill was adorable, her black hair almost feathered, but still somehow modern. She looked like a 1970s shampoo commercial.  She was wearing a corset-like top, fitted, with gentle lace so when I pulled on it, the delicate lace ripped a bit at the seam.

“You actually ripped my corset,” she said. “I feel like I’m in a Harlequin Romance novel.”  When I flipped her over, she beautifully flipped me back. And we wrestled like that for a while, kissing and laughing. The torn lace hung off her shoulder, and her hair was stuck to her face with the exertion of trying to flip me onto my back, and I felt a surf of desire to share the elusive subtly of her. To fall underneath this girl who wore lace and a pink satin bra. To share in her divine femininity.

Instead, I flipped Jill onto her back. Perhaps my desire for a motorcycle came from this. The urge to mount something powerful, and women, to me, are the most powerful forces I know.

We stayed up most of the night talking and laughing, and I felt a comfort with her that was rare. When morning arrived, I woke to freshly brewed coffee and Jill, looking at home in my terrycloth robe.

“Wake up, sleepy-head,” she said. “I’ve brewed some coffee, but you are out of cream and sugar.” She seemed so perfectly placed in my kitchen, browsing through my cupboards, like she had always been a part of my landscape.  I took her face in my hands and said, “I’ve a very important question for you.”

“God, so earnest,” she said, sucking on the hair that fell into her mouth in a way so vulnerable it made me want to kiss her again. “Go ahead and ask.”

“Do you have a bike?”

“No, I’m so clumsy, I’d tip it over!” Me too, I thought.  Gosh, she was cute.  “Why? Is it a prerequisite for me to date you to own a bike?” she asked.

She handed me a cup of coffee and kissed me sweetly on the cheek. “No,” I said, nuzzling into her damp hair. “I guess it’s not.”

After coffee, we created new artwork for my breasts. Jill was much more skilled with the paintbrush than Mario, and the flowers she crafted were no mere daisies but instead swirls of vibrant color–a golden sunflower on the right and a (larger) blushing peony on the (larger) left boob. We were late for the parade.

I did not care.

 

Walking around the parade with Jill, I felt my heart blossoming like the flowers on my body. We collected candy thrown from floats and marveled at the creativity of the parade goers. A woman in a bicycle with tampons on the spokes and a sign announcing “the menstrual cycle” walked by." You're fabulous!” Jill yelled, in affirmation, and the woman rang her bicycle bell in response. 

“But where are the Dykes on Bikes?” Jill asked, looping her right finger into the belthole of my jean-shorts. 

“Oh. They start the parade,” I said.

“Oh no! You missed them!” 

I pulled her closer to me, kissing her bare shoulder.  “I’m not missing anything,” I said.