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And they made clear to me that we can have a different sort of pride this year: pride in our history, pride in our accomplishments, pride in our resilience through tragedy, and pride in our capacity to find new things to love about our home. The stories people shared with me were sometimes dark and painful, sometimes light and funny, and always enlightening. The bright, public LGBTQ world we see around us in the Cities today was built on these foundations, the way modern Rome coexists with, and couldn’t exist without, its ancient skeleton of roads, monuments, and ruins. Names many of us haven’t heard about in years-or decades. With that in mind, I called a number of prominent folks in the LGBTQ community and asked, ‘What would you tell someone who arrived with a rainbow suitcase today about LGBTQ life in the Twin Cities before they got here?’ What landmarks should we know about this personal, political, geographical Twin Cities we all share?Īnd, in a rush of memories, they talked to me about bars and bookstores, softball leagues and churches, theater troupes and travel companies, hookup spots and health centers. But what was long hidden is easy to lose. Hiding in forts was useful, important, necessary. Paul memoir, The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s-one of the best mid-20th century looks at American gay experience-the LGBTQ life was “a ruse that kept all of us safe,” conducted in “a fort in the midst of a savage and hostile population.” LGBTQ cultures have, historically, needed to hide their bars and bedrooms for fear of eviction, firing, imprisonment, or worse. Each of us lives in a different Twin Cities: We share the Foshay Tower and the Mississippi, but we go home to different bars and bedrooms. Of course, the cancelling of Pride-the festival, the parade, the week when tens of thousands of far-flung LGBTQ peeps come streaming home-represents an act of love to keep people healthy.īut its absence presents us with an opportunity to consider all the profound and important local LGBTQ landmarks that built Pride-and often disappeared. It feels like saying we’re cancelling joy and progress. Later on, the civil rights “march” became more of a festival. Its destination, Loring Park, represented a spot where LGBTQ people often encountered danger and arrest.
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The second Twin Cities Pride March, in 1973.