Today the streets of Manhattan’s West Village were packed with revelers celebrating the New York Pride March that happens every year on June 28 to commemorate what was essentially the beginning of a global gay rights campaign, the so-called Stonewall Riots (more on that in a moment).
My wife and I attended our first Pride March, or as it’s more commonly referred to, the Gay Pride Parade, last year, entirely on accident. We had only lived in the city for a few weeks when we decided to spend a Sunday after church wandering around the West Village. We heard the music first as we made our way down Sixth Avenue and we followed the sound until we found the crowds, loosely packed initially, crowding outside of the many bars and restaurants in the Village, and then, suddenly, the sidewalks were so full of people that it became nearly impossible to get around.
As we had only intended to take a leisurely stroll, our goal once we found ourselves surrounded by partially undressed men, barely dressed women, drag queens and the like (there were, of course, a majority of not-so-eccentric people around, but somehow that detail is less memorable) was to find our way out of the crowds and back onto more lightly populated streets. But in that time we saw and experienced a lot of what went on at the parade and, again, being new to the city, we needed several more hours of walking just to debrief.
I’m going to avoid passing judgment on what we saw in the streets last year, or again this year as we tried to make our way through the West Village to the East to find a bar to watch the final game of the Confederation Cup tournament. I will say that I am and always have been of a more reserved temperament, embarrassed, even as a child, when my sister would do something eccentric like dance in the aisles at a family restaurant. So for that reason the kind of partying that happens as the Pride Parade makes its way through the city causes apprehension and embarrassment in me and, generally, an urge to flee.
But more than that it always causes me to question. How should I feel? Is what is happening here something that I should react to on moral grounds? What would a family member or church friend do or think in this situation? What do gay people who are more reserved think of the parade?
Last night my mom called for what I thought was going to be one of those regular, “How’s life in the big city” conversations that we’ve both grown so fond of, and for a minute there it seemed that is where we were heading. Her line of questioning was pretty standard:
“How’s Steph? How’s work? What are you writing? When are you coming home next?” All quite normal, and then this, “Are you a part of the Emerging Church?” I nearly spit out the beer I was quietly drinking in an old habit of hiding the fact that I would dare drink a beer whilst talking to her on the phone.
“Emerging Church? Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time,” I say doing my best impression of Sir Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope.
The thing is, a few years ago I was all about the emerging church. As a principle I’m generally for all things emerging and the idea that we could do church in a whole new way, in a way that, frankly and controversially, seemed in many aspects more biblical than the kind of churches I grew up in was actually quite appealing.
It looks like Michael Bay's Transformers 2 is, as feared, the worst movie of the year. So naturally, critics are lining up to get in their best shots, and to one-up each other with their jokes, insults, and metaphors for indescribable awfulness. A lot of them are fantastic, so we've collected the best of the best here.
Oh, and if you still want to see this movie after reading these? I'm not sure there's a word for what you are.
“I swear to you that I have never had a film experience that felt longer than the whopping 149 minutes of Revenge of the Fallen, every single one of which I wish I had spent doing something else.” – Brian Tallerico, Movie Retriever
“John Yoo would not be able to draft a memo excusing the torment this movie inflicts on its audience, yet tens of millions of us will line up to shovel money at it this weekend. God bless America.” – Dana Stevens, Slate
More after the jump.
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