Pride!

Today I went to Barcelona's Pride Parade.  It was pretty amazing.  I took the metro down to the beginning of the parade route.  As I emerged from the tunnel I was suddenly enveloped in warm sunshine and Lady Gaga.  There are a lot of things right with this parade.  Let me call out a few:

1. Police Prius escort.  This does not top dykes on bikes, but it was kind of cool.
2. Fetish fags on stilts.  That's right.  Gigantic chariot-horse mohawks, Marilyn Manson makeup, and bondage gear.
3. The floats - muy grande.  They don't use the average American flatbed truck.  Imagine a semi-truck full of BEARcelona gays (that's really their name) and double decker buses blasting "It's Raining Men" and actually raining men. 
4. They got rhythm.  Every other group was a kick-ass, dancing, samba-percussion group.
5. Nipples are legal.  'nough said.
6. Everyone is tan, fit, and unbelievably gorgeous...and they all smoke.  It's like I really don't have to have any standards here.  I also don't understand how everyone parties hard and still looks amazing.
7. No alcohol restrictions left over from Prohibition.  Even though people were slinging beers out of their backpacks, hardly anyone acted wasted.  The focus was not on getting totally trashed.  EVERYONE was just out in the streets looking for an excuse to dance.  
8. Not a lot of corporate sponsorships.  The floats all seemed like they were for local gay businesses or activisty groups.
9. The parade began at 5 pm.  This would be a plus for my nightowl gay friends.
10. There really is universal gay music (i.e.Lady Gaga and Madonna).  This made me feel all warm and squishy about being connected to a global queer community.

Despite all these amazing things I experienced today at Pride, I gotta say Oly and Seattle definitely have an edge with representing the queer, female-bodied  individuals and communities.  The event was very male-dominated and as far as I could tell there wasn't a super visible presence for female-assigned people.  I missed my butches, dykes, tranny bois, drag kings, FTMs, and genderqueers.  

I also met a cool group of Filipinas!  This is really exciting for me.  We, of course, ended up talking about food for an hour.  I got to practice my Taglish and we will be meeting up soon to have dinner.

I am really sad that I don't have a digital camera so that I can show all the amazing things I'm seeing!  Hopefully I can figure that out soon :)