Mirror Universe Pride

"The streets were jammed with throngs of gay men wearing feathers and leather and sometimes next to nothing at all!"

We all leaned in closer to hear the details.

"I thought it was the Apocalypse! I was waiting to be Raptured away from this cauldron of vice when I heard the men greeting each other again and again with the words 'Happy Pride!'--as though it were a holiday. A holiday!"

There was an indignant gasp from the group.

"But more shocking things were to come. The streets had become filled with music and shouting and happy children and there was even a petting zoo. All moral order was clearly gone. Civilization trembled on the brink of collapse. Happily married men and women were on the verge of turning queer. Can you imagine it? Mothers about to abandon their children, shedding their blouses and pulling on flannel shirts. Men mincing around in public and calling each other Mary."

"Holy mother!" came a shocked lament from Fredrick, a devout Catholic.

"War is upon us!" muttered Axel.

"The city was a labyrinth... I couldn't escape! Every street was clogged with dancing and prancing and near nudity. And the police just stood there and watched it happen!"

Horrified glances circulated through the group.

"And then I caught sight of Iqued. I thought I was saved. A fellow straight man at last! Here, in the very heart of the end times! Together we would face down this unholy horde. We'd duck and dodge and pray and make our way like fugitives to some rare and distant sanctuary. But then I got a closer look and saw the red lacquered nails... and the pink feather boa!" Groans erupted and trembling hands covered eyes: more than one face blanched. "That's right, brothers, grab your crucifixes and pray for strength. Pray for deliverance. Iqued no longer a womanizer, but dressed like... a woman!"

Horror, like an electric current, brought the hackles of every man jack to rigid attention. Our narrator looked my way. "And then you came sailing through the horde, your big belly parting the sea of sinners like the prow of a warship. The deep-cut crease of your frowning brow was like a cannon raised and ready; your visage was red and pinched with anger. You were a straight man!"

Everyone shrieked with laughter.

"Dieter, cut it out."

"But you looked just like your dad!"

"Dude, I am warning you..."

Iqued patted my belly. "You better lay off them Burdick's chocolates," the token straight man in our company teased.

I do not have a "big belly" like my dad did. (I just have a small belly. And... okay, fine. I need to get to the gym more.) Anyway, my dad didn't have a ruddy complexion, he was more olive skinned--he always said that his branch of the family tree had some Native American in it, but as far as I am concerned I'm half Irish and half German. Even if two of my maternal uncles found out a few years ago that our "German" side is actually Polish, I don't care. That's my lineage, and I'm sticking to it.

Around us, Pride bustled. There were lots of happy gay men everywhere, but there were lots of straights, too, and they didn't look offended. Even the scrawny guy standing over yonder with a weird little smile and a placard inviting us to turn to Jesus and be "healed" didn't look scared or upset--though to me he looked like someone who could use a little healing himself.

I pointed him out to Fredrick. "Freak," Fredrick muttered, which was uncharitable, but he was sensitive to the fractious interface of religion and sexuality, more so now that his efforts to bring his husband to the States as a legal resident alien had proven futile. Fredrick blamed politically powerful religious homophobes for his plight, but I suspected anti-immigrant fervor also had plenty to do with how the law treats gay bi-national couples.

Everyone was still laughing at the image of me as some sort of Christian homophobe. "Is that the end of your random little nightmare?" I asked my cousin.

Dieter sighed. "Sadly, yes. That's when I woke up. Except for one other thing... as we were shoving our way through the crowd, everyone kept calling us names. They kept saying things like, 'Ow!' and 'Watch where you're going!' Then Axel came fighting his way through the throng. He had a wife and three kids with him. He came up to a group of queens who were eating ice cream and punched one of them in the head. 'Don't you look at my kids like that!' he screamed. The queens got all up in his grill, so the two of us stepped up and told those queens not to mess with our religious freedoms."

"Because the Constitution guarantees the right of faith-based bodily assault?" I asked.

"Look, it was a dream. It doesn't have to make sense," Dieter replied.

"But it does make sense," Axel said. "Iqued was gay? You guys were religious? And I had a wife... and kids?" For a moment, Axel looked queasy.

"Yeah, that wasn't no reflection of real life. You an' a woman? Ain't no way. Sorry, Axel, my man... but ain't no way!" Iqued hooted at the thought of it. I wondered, and not for the first time, what Iqued was doing at gay pride with us. He said it was because he wanted to spend more time with Fredrick, who is still his brother even if he is gay--or that's what Iqued is always telling Fredrick.

But Iqued has gone to drag shows and other gay events with me before, with Fredrick nowhere in sight, so who knows? Maybe he's one of those what do you call 'ems. Fag stags. More likely, it's some straight guy version of the honey trap: a gathering of gays means fun and a crowd where a girl can relax and not worry about straight mashers--like Iqued. My best friend was clever to figure that one out. Unless, of course, the straight girls knew that he knew that they knew that gay crowds were safe and fun for straight girls... and would therefore draw smart straight guys... who knew that the straight girls would be there...

My head was starting to throb as I attempted to parse Breeder Logic.

Axel, meantime, was still trying to articulate some idea of his own. He finally made his point. "Dieter's dream was about a mirror universe Pride!"

We looked at him blankly, except for Dieter the Star Trek fan. "That's brilliant!" he cried. "You're right!" He looked around at us with excitement. "You know--the mirror universe? Evil Sulu? Spock with a beard? Everybody the opposite of their usual selves?"

"Yeah, we get it," Fredrick said. Then: "Well, no, I don't get it."

"Don't you ever wonder what you'd be like if you were straight?" Axel queried the group--though he was shooting an irritated glance toward Iqued. "How would being straight change you? Would you even still be you? Are you really supposed to be who you are, or is everything about a person so dependent on chance that there's no set self, nothing special and deliberate about who you are?"

"You mean are we gay or straight depending on a roll of the dice?" asked Fredrick. "For me, gay is the only way."

"Said the man who once married a woman," Iqued chided his brother. "If anyone is a poster boy for change and flux, it's you!"

"I know better now," Fredrick shot back. "It took me time to figure out who I am, but now I don't have to wonder any more. How's that whole sorting yourself out thing going for you?"

"Hey man, I didn't never have to wonder whether I like boys or girls," Iqued said defensively. "Far as I'm concerned, the more gay men in the world, the better for me! Pickin's are slim enough already, who needs more straight guys to compete with?"

That was a pragmatic view. Was that what they mean by Enlightened Self-Interest? If it comes to that, then, what was a person's Self? Could it be said to be changeless, when clearly human beings change all the time? Is love a matter of eternal souls in harmony, or was it all a matter of sexual attraction flaring and then fading, the body making its demands? The flesh being transient--and fickle--how could love hope to endure forever? I thought about the skyrocketing divorce rate. I thought about everything Fredrick was giving up to make a leap of faith that would carry him across the ocean. I thought back to my own leap of faith, when I, like Fredrick, left the life I knew to join my husband overseas at his new job.

My husband, who says Pride is one big block party--without even the virtue of public drinking. At least in Europe, street parties come complete with booze. He was at home watching the World Cup--my sports nut! It worked out for us. May Fredrick be as blessed.

Maybe it was a sudden burst of philosophizing, or maybe everybody was contending with hangovers, but a silence fell over the group... except for the other straight man among us, Dieter, whose eye had fallen on a fried dough stand.

"He eats and drinks with the wicked," Fredrick smiled, watching my cousin make a beeline.

"Hey Dieter! You know you're spending your straight money at a gay event!" I yelled.

A buff guy who had been checking my cousin out looked puzzled, then disappointed, and melted back into the crowd: another possibility lost to the shifting currents of random chance? Could we, I pondered, have lived other lives with a few ccs more or less of some hormone in utero, or with a simple neurological tweak? Or are each of us fated... or, perhaps, graced... with the sexuality we are given?

If each of us truly is created expressly and lovingly by the gods--or, in the view of monotheists, by a God--then should we not only expect, but also embrace a wide array of humanity? Why would the gods (or God) be limited to a single type or a single strain? Why would any all-powerful creator funnel all that generative power into some sort of monoculture, one generation of uniform people giving rise to an exact duplication in the next generation, forever? Is that really what the gods want? It all sounds so... fascist.

And indeed, we see a stunning variety in every aspect of human life: an array of language, culture, body-type, even religious faith. Why should anybody think there's only one "right" form of love, sexuality, or family? Fredrick was at least partly correct: thinking like that has set the conditions under which Iqued's brother has to go off and live in exile--an exile for love.

And what about that guy with the Jesus sign? I had looked at him with scorn earlier but now I felt a pang of pity so deep it hurt; the thought of what he must have endured to end up where he stood, with that disconcerting, frozen, sort of creepy grin... a sympathy, almost a tenderness toward him, welled up... I glanced his way again. He looked back at me, something odd and desperate in his eyes... and something harsh, too...

If the gods give us the gift of Self and Life and we, seizing on one aspect of human life ("Procreation!"), shut out all other possibilities, then how are we fulfilling the will or the design of the Divine? Aren't we simply imposing man-made limitations where the gods never saw fit to impose them? I thought of walking over to the Jesus sign guy and asking him how it could possibly be in honor of some "Culture of Life" that anyone would try to force himself into a persona or mode of being for which he clearly was not meant.

But that would be awkward, and anyway, Dieter was back among us now, and we were moving in a little knot, deeper into the crowd, away from the Jesus sign and its puzzlements, into happiness and liberation--into Pride with a capital P. For a moment it was like walking through a series of mental frames of reference, each frame a distinct place where things made sense in one way--only to give way to another frame, another set of references, inferences, conclusions. It was like falling down a rabbit hole... or walking through mirrors...

Dieter bit into his treat. "Gay, straight, it doesn't matter," he mumbled as he munched. "Fried dough by any other name..."

"Is still greasy shit that's gonna give you a fat ass!" laughed Iqued.

"You just keep your eyes off my ass, mister," Dieter told him, taking another defiant bite, and the two straight boys laughed along with their little horde of gay friends. A similar group meandering by--a rough and colorful reflection of our own little band--threw smiles in our direction. "Happy Pride!" they called.

Just as on any other holiday.