Pride

You should never attend pride with your friends and their partners, as a single person and here's why. For one, people get really strange ideas about what that means. What we know for sure is that you don't have to be accountable to anyone for your actions, which can invite some snide comments. Secondly, you're always your gay-est when you are dating but as a free agent you'll be asked to confirm your allegiance. Hopefully any suspicions will be dispelled, at the end of the day. It wasn't my intention to be omitted from the domain of licensed adventure, so it was important to be receptive. Needless to say, under ordinary circumstances; my attitude would have been the culprit.    
      
Essentially someone becomes a receptacle through, which people can act out their own fantasies. Your comrades generally want to live vicariously through their unattached counterparts and this usually means ushering in a new type of sorority. It's hard to know exactly what we should've been expecting but oppression is much like war, in the sense that, it draws out some peculiar sentiments. Feelings that are normally difficult to reconcile sit side by side; such as outrage and surrender. We usually arrived with a lot on hearts, such as current trends impacting the community. Our instincts were jogged, immediately after settling in; as if brass tacks were inside of our back pockets.      
     
There was sea of estrogen forming against the city's design and began to calm. The resurgence was swaddled in variegated colors that signified the freedom of choice celebration. Something larger than us began to swim my way and injected hope into the air; my emotions were jarred. Optimistically urging for change as it pertained to equal pay, opportunity and visibility seemed like the ideal undercurrent for experimenting. Unfortunately, there is no escape clause during an event like this; provided you're young and down for the feminist cause. Respectively, making the interests of the individual vs the state was a zero sum game.      
     
Assumption was charged about ways to level out the playing field. As a result, my peers reached a consensus that made me the outpost. The mission was to flash my breasts at unsuspecting bystanders, on demand. The first few times I was dispossessed but eventually became anesthetized, although it was the spirit of indemnity that pulled me through. Assailed and impervious did a nice job setting the tone of voice. You would probably have to have been detonated out of your mind to do this as freely as some veteran activists did. How you truly measured up against vulnerability was anyone's guess but Newtonian physics rattled my enclosure and did something to them as well.      
     
It was hard to say how they mapped their victims out but it happened ceremoniously. Their attention was held by the harvest of facial expressions. Tracking nuances from person to person was like a meditation but being headless, for a few seconds, reduced me to speculation. A totalitarian choke hold made it impossible for me to see what the feedback was whether good, bad or ugly. That was an insidious side effect, as if being in stealth and making an ass of predictability wasn't enough. Consequently, mining for responses from utter strangers became its own business; since Nerf Super Soakers, breathable clothes and mini portable fans weren't enough to mitigate the heat.       
     
Part of the appeal was the fact that everyone wanted to see the nerd push the envelope by doing something completely out of character. My diary had a chastity belt around it, questions that might pop up on a date were rehearsed for and my toiletries marched on the shelves. There must have been some transgression that escaped them and the drive to find it overrode reprieve, which was convenient since the movement rarely gets a day off.

The internet (Gay.com and Planet Out) spawned real life bonds that were unforgiving, during the mid to late 1990's. Examples like this eventually became relegated to the imagination, although they really did happen. Pictures were often lost to the end of the world archives but we are the ultimate proof that we actually took place; haunted by a searing need to make an impression in this world. The ability to explore our surroundings in unorthodox ways allowed us to complete the module on being in charge of our bodies. There were incidentals, such as picking up after the wreckage; but we learned to survive ourselves.