The parking is always a nightmare, even when you think you’ve safely parked in the vendor area. A couple hours into the day, a festival volunteer asks you to leave your booth to move your car and find other parking. They suggest a neighboring garage, which you queue up for while your car’s AC blasts warm air at your face. By the time you’ve made two loops inside the garage, you realize that the entry gate doesn’t calculate the garage’s capacity, and so you are now trapped in a continuous train of anxious gays looking for parking spots that don’t exist. At some point, you take a wrong turn and wind up in a dead-end near the entrance, where cars are still filtering in, obliviously entering this queer crab trap and watching you scoot your bright yellow Honda Fit back and forth to make a 17-point turn.
You do eventually escape and make your way to the parking lot next to the Indiana Historical Society. After you pay your $20 to the gate attendant, you hear her coworker shout to her to let in Marriott employees for free. You briefly consider telling the attendant that you work there, but then you remember that you’re wearing a glittery mesh shirt, a dog collar, and shiny gold shorts.
That shirt, as it turns out, is rapidly deteriorating in the heat. The insides of your elbows are plastered in sparkles and when you look down your shirt at your chest, you look like you’ve been bodied by a fairy, which may yet happen, if you’re lucky.
But for that dream to come true, you must pass the Good Ol’ Gauntlet. The first encampment of Bible-thumpers is waiting on the lawn of the Historical Society. You slow your pace and keep yourself between the megaphones and the group of queer teenagers wearing trans and non-binary flags as capes. You’re good bait in your shiny booty-shorts: small, unassuming, smiling pleasantly, inherently approachable despite the rainbow attire. The thumpers focus on you, pushing pamphlets your way while the caped crew passes mostly unharrassed. The evangelists say something directly to you, about you. You smile and absorb nothing.
A Historical Society employee is stationed next to them and he apologizes to you on their behalf and makes sure you know these people have nothing to do with the Society.
“I didn’t figure the Historical Society would support these guys,” you say. “Y’all are good folks.”
Suddenly, you are receiving an impromptu lecture from the employee about the Society’s NRA funding and its affection for Mike Pence.
“Oh. I didn’t know that,” you say.
“Spread the word,” he tells you.
You nod and continue on.
There are more proselytizers this year than you’ve seen since you first attended a Pride festival. They are stationed around the ticket line to the festival grounds, waving black signs with scripture in a stark white font.
“Love is patient! Love is kind!” a sunburned man on a crate yells at passersby. “It does not envy! It does not boast! It is not proud! Do you hear that? Love is not proud? Does that sound familiar to you?”
You are familiar with 1 Corinthians. You wonder if this finger-jabbing man is proud of what he’s doing. You wonder if perhaps he’s even a little bit envious as you position yourself between him and the line of festival-goers.
The festival grounds team with flags and people of a thousand different colors. You return to your booth and you watch beautiful drag queens sweep effortlessly by on heels that somehow don’t sink into the soil. One of your leather pup friends hugs you and takes a selfie with you in the shade of the canopy. You see young folks wearing pronoun pins and you remember being their age and not even knowing trans people existed. You only knew that you were an alien back then. There just weren’t other words for what you were, so you were an alien, and gosh, that explained a lot. You were so lonely, so clumsy, so far from home.
As the afternoon wears on, your voice grows hoarse from greeting your friends and complimenting strangers’ makeup. You buy a drink that’s mostly tequila and the bartender - who for some reason assures you that she’s straight - accidentally makes a second drink, tells you you’re cute, and hands it to you. You’ve played this game with your straight cis female friends before and know this isn’t flirting but it’s nice to be called cute and even nicer to double the drink on such a long, hot, dusty day.
You’re there for several hot hours, the rainbow foil stars melting into your sweat and pasting themselves over your body. You feel like a very slowly transforming were-disco-ball.
Eventually, you’re maxed out. Your girlfriend is recovering from a nasty cold but she came with you today despite it and you’re so grateful but if she stays here any longer she’s going to collapse. You haul your cooler a few blocks to the parking garage. The street preachers have dispersed. Love apparently wasn’t all that patient in the end.
You go to dinner with your friends at a pub you and your girlfriend have been meaning to check out for a few months. The antique interior briefly unsettles you until you see the Progress Pride pin on the server’s lapel. It will be OK to use the bathroom here.
After you pay the tab, one of your friends gives you a drawing he’s made of you as a Pokemon trainer and you are so surprised and delighted and tired that you tear up. How incredibly thoughtful. How kind, how generous, how full of love.
You get home and want so badly to just topple into a nest of pillows but your girlfriend won’t let you so much as sit on the edge of the bed. The sparkles spackled across your torso would breach containment and permanently glitter your sheets. You MUST take a shower, but at least your girlfriend has offered to help.
You scrub the grime and sunscreen off of each other and trade time under the shower head. There’s another party you could attend tonight but you’d rather stay here, together.
Later, as you snuggle on the couch with your love, you search “indiana historical society pence” and discover the Society did indeed host an event and book-promotion for Mike Pence last November. Unfortunate. You wonder what your uncle would say in the Society’s defense. You have an imaginary argument with your uncle even though you know you’re both on the same side, even through he was the one that introduced you to the local queer scene. You give up on the argument because you’ve already rehashed it too many times. You are frustrated with his optimistic expectations but you can’t bring yourself to argue against hope.
Just before bed, you double-check 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 and wonder if the red-faced men screaming hate at children ever got to the end of that famous passage:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
And so will you.