The parade of hoses Or Your pride is showing

I wasn’t going to write anything about the Gay Pride Parade. Like most virgin experiences, it’s better to keep things to yourself.

Plus, I need a personal a moratorium on the topic. The right wing nuts are trying to make a political issue about gays and marriage and family values, which sets off an endless cycle of sameness in a debate where new points are hardly ever made.

In Chicago we had to deal with a week’s worth of talk radio about Sox manager Ozzie Guillen calling one of the biggest prima donna sportswriters ever a fag from other sports writers who got on their high horses. Because, as we know, sports guys with radio shows never use locker room talk and there is nary a homophobe in the bunch.

But back to the event. When you make your first openly gay friends when they invite you to tag along to their parade with them it’s a nice gesture.

Even if one of them thinks he is clever and wears a T-shirt he bought at Hot Topic that says “Taste My Rainbow.” It was clever until he saw about a dozen other people in the same shirt. He also kept telling a joke about not ever wearing boxer shorts to the parade because he would get a boner. He reminded me of my corny dad, if my dad turned out to be gay, which aside from his love of watching figure skating and the music of Barbara Streisand, I am pretty sure isn’t the case.

Next year I will invite the boys to the South Side Irish parade and wear my plaid shorts and wool sweater. Wait, I already wore that outfit down in Beverly. Up North, I wore my usual baggy shorts with a checked camp shirt (no double meaning intended) and, for a touch of gay, a black sleeveless T-shirt under the top.

Anyway, parades of all sorts are funny in part because groups that don’t want to be stereotyped trot out the stereotypes. Plus, human sexuality is pretty funny when you stop to think about it. So this had the potential to be twice the funny.

But both the Irish and the gay parades are way too long, so to speak, clocking in at over three hours each, which makes you sleepy, even if you aren’t drinking.

Both are filled with politicians and drag queens. Wait, in the Irish parade those are step dancers, not drag queens.

Both draw families. The questions kids ask are different, though.

On the South Side, it can be, “Daddy, why is that man sick? Why is he throwing up in the garbage can?” Or, “Can I pee on the bushes, too?”

On the North Side, it could have been, “Daddy, why is that man wearing my Superman Underoos, and why did he put his socks in them?” Or, “Can I take a bubble bath outside, too?”

The South Side parade had men in kilts, while the North Side had men in dresses and gubernatorial candidate Judy Barr Topinka who was in pants but who looked a lot like some of the guys in dresses. Poor Judy looks a bit like the transgendered, and let’s be honest. God has not been kind to these people -- they don’t look fabulous as either sex (see John Lithgow in The World According to Garp).

And our illustrious governor Rod was shaking hands. Metrosexual he is, it appeared by his graying sideburns that he dies his well-coiffed mane.

And fabulous was the cliché of the day. Another moratorium: if I seen another twink with six pack abs, bleached teeth and gelled hair dancing about in his spandex boy shorts, it will be too soon.

Also, drag queens with biceps like tree trunks dressed like they are in the carnival down in Rio scare me. Maybe my mom made me watch a Carmen Miranda movie when I was little, who knows?

Another moratorium: gays, at least parading ones, should get over the disco music. There was one Latin rock band. That was nice, but add some show tunes, even.

For you suburban dads, there weren’t too many of those lipstick lesbians marching by, but there were crew-cutted dykes on bikes revving their engines.

Mostly, there were companies giving away crap, including beads as everything is a Mardi Gras anymore. This was the most corporate parade I have ever attended, though, and I can see why.

Most gays don’t have kids, which means they have expendable income. They are a desirable demographic, especially in a big city, which is to say pink and green look great together.

Money changes everything.