Executive VP Brenna is here today to talk about how Margaret Cho helped her on her journey through the history of parades.

Happy Pride, to all who celebrate! This weekend is the traditional one for a Pride Parade (but if you, like Glen Weldon, prefer to stay quietly inside in temperature controlled spaces, that is also your right), so parade with me down history lane to talk about how we got to the edge of this crowded thoroughfare (please remember where we parked). I took some inspiration from the suggested questions on the search page:

What IS the point of parades? Most likely: celebrating being/staying alive. According to the Farmer’s Almanac, there are cave paintings from 10 millennia ago showing early humans proudly carting a carcass through an impressed crowd, presumably lined up with their folding chairs and looking for free entrails strewn along the route. Like most gatherings, some people were really impressed with themselves, and others were just waiting to eat.

Religious processions take up the next leg of history. Carvings from Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hittites, as well as writings from Tamil people, document big community walks to the temple. The ancient Greeks extended festival ceremonies through the streets to celebrate the sowing of seeds, the maturation of the harvest, or the invention of dick jokes. The Romans and the Chinese seem to have been the ones who brought in the generals, with a triumphant (literally, it was called The Roman Triumph) march through town to show off the spoils of war - plunder, captives, sometimes battle reenactments. In British English, “parade” is actually reserved to refer to a military presentation, with “processional” being used for all the other fancy float feats.

The first significant procession to be documented in the U.S. happened in Philadelphia the day the Constitution was ratified, on June 21, 1788, and it appears to have ended at “a communal larder” - aka a potluck. I love potlucks! Parades became less convivial and more formal between 1825 and 1850, and the growth of more diversity in communities gave rise to the parade as a celebration of identity rather than just a congratulatory ride for a wedding/funeral/national holiday. Irish communities were the first to open the way for distinctive identity parades — researchers say St. Augustine, Florida, may have seen a St. Patrick’s Day parade in 1601! The Chinese immigrants that had made California their home started parading for Chinese New Year in 1851, and in 1857 the first Mardi Gras parade hit the streets of New Orleans.

The self-billed largest parade in the U.S. is Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; the coldest might be St. Paul’s Winter Carnival parade (it’s in January in Minnesota; I can’t find stats but I can tell you one year we had 30 straight days below freezing, so). The Rose Parade in Pasadena requires all floats to be covered in only natural materials; Disney’s Main Street Electrical Parade requires everyone to be covered in lights.

I grew up in Rapid City, the second-largest metropolis in South Dakota, and a town small enough that I was in several parades before I was 18 (mostly because I was in Job’s Daughters). We had parades for the Fourth of July, for Homecoming, for Memorial and Labor Days; no sort of Pride event took place until three years after I moved away. I learned about Pride parades from Margaret Cho. She had a stand-up routine on Comedy Central in what the internet tells me was 1994 (and her outfit corroborates). In it (around 15:12), she is mocking her mom, saying, “‘IS HE THE GAY?’ Well, God, Mom, I don’t know if he’s THE gay. That’s a lot of pressure to be the gay — all that resting on one guy. He has to do the parade all by himself.” I didn’t have Microsoft Encarta at the time, so I had to resort to making assumptions that there were, in fact, dozens of gay people out there, and they got to have parades… elsewhere.

The first time I attended a Pride Parade was in Manhattan in 2003; I have to say, it’s a pretty good one to start with. There were many thousand dozens of people present. As they say, the first Pride was a riot; the NY Police raided a popular gay bar, the Stonewall Inn on Christopher St., in the wee early hours of June 28, 1969. Patrons resisted arrest and protesters showed up later in the day, and continued protesting into the following week. One year later, communities in Chicago and L.A. as well as New York gathered for demonstrations to commemorate Christopher Street Liberation Day. Fifty-three years later, parades are held globally to celebrate the broad spectrum of identities and attractions across the axes of gender and sexuality, and to remind us all that being who we want to be isn’t easy, and hasn’t even always been legal.

So back to the first question: What is the point of parades? I think I like this definition best: “in order to make a collective point, not just to each other, but also to bystanders.” The point might be celebrating local horticulture or honoring an achievement, or reminding each other and bystanders that we’re here, we’re alive, and let’s have a party about it. Potluck to follow.