I hold onto a giant, floating E. M. Forster with seven other people in period costume, wave as we walk down the avenue towards Times Square and then farther south to the docklands, and I pretend to be dour and love nature. I would have chosen Walt Whitman, but I had no choice. This year’s theme is Modernist Queers. We guide inflatables in the shape of gay icons—Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, Colette … . The float ahead of us presents the tableaux of a mollyhouse, men dressed as women taunting and teasing both each other and the men dressed as men. A marching band follows us, playing some period song of same-sex love, sponsored by a condom enterprise. We have spared no detail, no expense. We have corporate sponsorship, media coverage. There will be a DVD for sale, which I’m going to buy. I’d like to see what they did for the twenties, with flappers and tuxedoed women in a washtub-gin setting. Serving in spectacles does not permit me to watch them (unless someone records them). Instead, I hold onto the role model, hoping it won’t float away, hoping it won’t float away with me. Perhaps this year the message will get through that we are not like everyone, that we are gods, that you must adore us, that you must want us, that you must fear us. We need to present a proud heritage. I’ve not yet decided if I feel pride or vainglory: here we are, the best and the brightest, look who we are, look who we could be. If you had no one to watch from a distance, you’d have to look at yourself, and we’d have to look at ourselves. My headset walkie-talkie buzzes: someone has fainted from heatstroke on the corseted lesbian suffragette float.
Aldo Alvarez is the author of Interesting Monsters: Fictions (Graywolf Press) and the founder, executive editor and publisher of Blithe House Quarterly : queer fiction lives here at www.blithe.com/. This story reprinted with permission of Graywolf Press.