Pride F/U

Well, it's over, the media campaign seemed to go over well, and I survived being a human billboard for HIV testing. It was HOT here (for Seattle) - mid 80's. Lots of scantily clothed gay men will have some really nasty sunburns in some painful places tomorrow.

I have some photos but for some reason blogger doesn't want to upload them. Hmm. What's up with that? Well, I'll try again later.

The only, well, challenging things were 1) one of our needle exchange volunteers got inspired by the other parade participants' low-clothing quotient and decided to strip down to his jock strap. I will spare you the photo, but just imagine this whole group of mostly middle aged, > 25 BMI, white t-shirted and sensibly sunscreened professional adults (granted with the word "prick" on their t-shirts) along with one guy with nothing left to guess about. I just made sure to walk on the other side of the billboard truck so I wouldn't have to look at his pasty white butt cheeks for the whole parade.

He would have solely stood out if it weren't for the developmentally disabled (99.9% sure he had downs syndrome) guy who wandered around for a while until he decided he wanted to be part of our group. How warm and accepting we were feeling until the parade started. We had these foam hand things to wave about in the air - sort of pointy - which later I realized when waved side to side probably looks like we're saying "no, no, no" - which probably is sort of appropriate for the HIV/AIDS prevention program but probably not the message we're wanting folks to come away with - but I digress. So, yes, we have these yellow foam pointy finger hand things and this guy, we'll call him George, spent the whole parade route doing one of the following:

1. Pretending he was penetrating himself anally with the finger

2. Pretending he was performing oral sex on the finger

3. Making a scooping motion with the hand so it looked like he was penetrating someone else

4. Touching his crotch like he was masturbating

And every time he did something the crowd went wild. Which didn't really help matters, as George just got more and more into it as the parade went on.

It's not like either were doing anything that wasn't going on elsewhere in the parade, and, well, this is Seattle and there aren't the same norms for behavior (or setting limits with others behaviors) as there might be in, say, Texas. "Celebrating diversity" we were. It just, well, it wasn't exactly what I wanted to be associated with. Prudish? Likely.But so be it.