Corporate Takeover of Gay Day

     When I first arrived in Seattle, in the eighties, there was a festering rift between the drag queens and the homosexuals.  The homosexuals didn't want the drag queens to ruin their image in the gay parade.  Can you imagine?  If it wasn't for those feisty queens at Stonewall in New York City, this national holiday we now call Gay Pride wouldn't even exist.
     Dressed up in their finest, the drag queens hit the streets in protest and marched themselves right down Broadway on  Saturday night.  My girlfriend and I decided to escort them on our motorcycles and were happy to see that Vik had the same idea.  It was a great march full of vitality and enthusiasm, unlike what I witnessed yesterday.
      Dykes on Bikes started things off with the usual uproar, flags flying, horns honking, the crowd screaming. It was impossible to not feel proud and gay.  But then (yawn!) something terrible happened.  Logo encrusted cars, boom boxes blaring,  their gay employees waving in their matching  t-shirts. Bank of America, Coca Cola, American Airlines, esurance, Microsoft, the radio stations it just didn't stop.  After about an hour I was pretty sure there must be a BP float back there somewhere, snuggled up with an Exxon float just waiting to be let out of the gate.   I tried to stay the course, I wanted to enjoy the parade, but the logo riddled procession of  internal combustion engines wasn't all that interesting.  The queers were lining the streets, packing the beer gardens and having brunch on the street corners, while corporate America strutted it stuff in the Gay Parade. What's happened?
Gay Day, historically, is an energizing day of celebration.  Gay Day 2010, in Seattle was anything but that. It was a celebration of our acceptance into the mainstream, acknowledgement of our importance as a consumer group, but....... hardly gay at all.   I'm hoping the queers were, at least, in the back of the bus waiting their turn to burst out of the gates and hit the streets. I just didn't have what it took to wade through the celebration of the corporate takeover.   I found it boring and insulting and  left in search of the queers. 
     If I hear one word in one gay publication about how we're in debt over this event, I'm definitely  calling the police because there were enough corporate "sponsors" to pay for three parades.