gay gay gay paree.

this saturday was paris pride, so here's the key vocab:

gouine = dyke
pédé = fag
marcher pendant des heures en dansant à la fois = dance-walking for hours
tout le monde drague ceux qui sont bien sapés = everyone hitting on the best dressed
en buvant des diabolo-menthes = while drinking mint-flavored lemonades
putain, ça déchire = what fucking fun.

i got more excited about pride than i've been in years. the idea of pride in a new place and in a different country made it somehow all the more lovely. the idea sparkled to the tips of my toes, which bounced accordingly through the streets of a very very gay paree. the funny thing is that what is different here is still so much the same. lesbian dancing is still lesbian dancing (you know, the way that the arms don't really move), and drunken lesbian dancing is still drunken lesbian dancing. the float music is the same song as in the us: it's raining men, y.m.c.a., or anything by shakira/madonna/glam 80s girl groups.

what is not the same? well, for one, the commie reds never miss a marching event:

and, since the parisian homos know that they'd rather not paradeify at the butt-ass crack of dawn after dancing all night, the parade itself doesn't start until the afternoon. so for the first time, i saw the entire parade. me, thomas, margaux, anne-laure (a great parisan queer that i met in one of my socio classes) and the girls from Anatomie Bousculaire (a fabulous queer rock group who restored my faith in french music after years of learning french from pathetic pop singers or terribly outdated crooners) all scored three tables at a sidewalk café from where we could see the floats (and the commie reds).

that's anne-laure (with the fraggle-style hair) talking to cécile (the lead singer of Anatomie Bousculaire).

it was good times. but after 7 hours spent dance walking in the sun with tons of folks and loud music, we came to place de la bastille (as in the Bastille, scene of the big french revolution) and saw this:

you can't herd gay men to a big phallus-shaped monument on pride day without them getting up and grindin' on it. you know how it is.

so even though folks were still in full-on party mode, we looked like this:

(that's anne-laure again and anne-julie, but please note margaux's fierce cyndi-lauper stylin')
because maybe we are getting old. that was the talk that ensued actually: are we still party people? can you be just by wanting to?
even if you can, we just went to margaux's house, took off our shoes, and lounged in various prone positions on the floor discussing feminist solidarity and russian literature.
we maybe are old, but damned if we aren't pretty and smart.