CAIN WILLIAMSON | 7.2.2008
ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS about my boyfriend is his totally overactive imagination. For the past eight years, I have woken up almost every morning to him saying, "Last night I had the craziest dream.”
And to my constant surprise, every dream really is crazier than the last. The one recurring theme is a constant quest to kill the Devil — certainly admirable, even if it is a little crazy.
His subconscious mind might routinely cast him in the role of Satan Slayer, but when he is awake, one of his favorite fantasies is of being a super-hot, suave, clever, and gay international operative ala Daniel Craig as James Bond, or Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. Even the ring tone on his phone is reminiscent of the Mission Impossible theme music.
He likes to refer to answering, or not answering, phone calls as choosing, or not choosing, to accept a mission. He is very cute and he makes me happy, but he does not have much opportunity to directly infiltrate and destroy international organizations of anti-gay super-villains.
But there are folks who do. Ken Coolen from the Vancouver Pride Society, who I met through InterPride (the International Association of Pride Organizers) recently spent some time in Moscow participating in the first ever successful Gay Pride march in that city.
Ken has a blog about the experience, www.xtra.ca, which weaves a tale of subterfuge, secrecy, clandestine meetings, and diplomatic dinners. Ken and Nikolai Alekseev, Moscow Pride Organizer, really do fit the bill of secret gay-gent men.
Nikolai and his band of daring queers pull off a banned Pride event right under the noses of Moscow Police, skinheads and other homophobic Muscovites.
It’s enough to make you Proud. It also brings home that Gay Pride is a global struggle for our human rights. As I have become more involved with Atlanta Pride and with InterPride, I have come to see even more clearly how thoroughly connected the work we do to secure our LGBTQ human rights here in Atlanta is to the work being done on the state, national, and international levels.
On the international level, the involvement of large Pride organizations such as Atlanta, San Francisco, Vancouver and others in InterPride makes it possible for the international organization to operate. And the organization provides financial resources, experience, and international exposure to event organizers struggling to produce events in unfriendly or even hostile environments such as Moscow, Sri Lanka and even Birmingham.
Closer to home, this year Atlanta Pride has partnered with Georgia Equality to create an exhibit at the event where you can spend some time exploring just how you are discriminated against as an LGBTQ person and take some action to say you're tired of it.
Pride comes around once a year, and this year we at Atlanta Pride have encountered one impossible mission after another. But our volunteers, staff and board have enthusiastically accepted and accomplished each mission.
Compared to what Nikolai and his comrades went through just to be able to publicly express who they are, what we went through was minor. In the city of Atlanta, we have not been fighting a fundamental rejection of our basic human nature.
Our struggles have been and continue to be administrative and financial. The shift in date and venue has resulted in a very different cost and revenue picture for us this year as compared to last.
So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get your ass to the Civic Center on July 4th weekend. Put on your darkest pair of spy shades, tuck a water gun at the small of your back in the waistband of your madras shorts, and penetrate the international homophobic establishment.
Once a year, my man actually gets to be an international, secrete gay-gent. That is one of many reasons I volunteer for Atlanta Pride.
In addition to his role on the Atlanta Pride Committee, Cain Williamson is a volunteer logistical operative for the Atlanta Gay Intelligence Agency (AGIA).
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