Our History in New York by Linsey Abrams

Author:Linsey Abrams [Abrams Linsey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504036795
Publisher: Open Road Distribution
Published: 2016-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

Gay Pride

On Gay Pride Day, Helen and I walked over to Fifth Avenue to watch the parade. We’d made plans to meet Rosalie and Alex afterwards, either at two that afternoon on the steps of the Jefferson Library or, if we missed them there, later, at the Palladium. On an occasion when half the lesbians and gay men in New York State and beyond congregate in downtown Manhattan, Helen thought it was unlikely we’d find them anywhere. But I had a feeling we would … because that’s the day you see half the people you ever knew, planned or not.

We got there early, for once, and though spectators jammed the sidewalks, the procession was still uptown. Policemen and women, stationed at the curb, kept asking people to stay on one side of the avenue or the other. But even they knew it was a lost cause. Every few minutes, you’d hear a shout, before a pair of old friends, maybe lovers, recognized each other from opposite sidewalks. The whole scene looked like something out of a Hitchcock movie … as if everyone present were under a compulsion to run into the street and kiss.

It was sunny and hot, for June, and the crowd was in high spirits. Total strangers talked and laughed amongst themselves … a phenomenon you don’t see so much anymore. Occasionally, someone would walk by encased from head to toe in black leather, despite the season … alternately in such scant attire as a jockstrap. There was an undercurrent of energy that comes from such exhibitionism in public, and the desire people always have, whether they admit it or not, to watch.

Though the parade was still several blocks away, you could hear the structure of the music, like a distant windchime. Eventually, Helen and I found a spot where we could see, under the awning of an apartment house near Eleventh Street. Our view here was unobstructed, except for one very tall man we figured we could move to the side of, and there was also a fire hydrant Helen could stand on to videotape. Across the street, the First Presbyterian Church took up the entire block, its nineteenth-century grandeur like some joke on the world that had followed.

Helen had finished loading a cassette into her camera. Having turned from the people around us, she was now taping the crowd across the street. Here, in front of the church, the kind of New Yorkers I remembered from an earlier era were filling paper cups with water on a cardtable. You could just imagine them on a freedom bus, twenty-five years before, wearing the same unassuming styles they did that afternoon … the men in short-sleeved shirts with belted trousers, and the women in patterned sheaths and flats. Gray hair ruled the day, though they weren’t so much older than Helen and I were.

That’s when I saw Monica. I grabbed her arm, and pulled her toward me from where she was passing near the curb. Helen, who’d met

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