EPISODE 1021: PRIDE

Intimations of Beauty and Truth Sitting on a Bar Stool Singing at Marie's Crisis

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

A while back I was at Marie’s Crisis, the queer singalong showtunes piano bar in the Village. In the bar stools surround the piano. Usually the piano player hopes that regulars will sit in those spots, because they understand the etiquette of the place (i.e. the stool is not a place to plop down and then turn away and talk to friends); probably they also know the songs, too, so they’ll sing along.

On this particular evening, two young women who were not regulars took up the stools at end pretty much from the time the bar opened. They were actually fine. They paid attention, they mostly sang along. It wasn’t really clear what their deal was, but all good.

But then, relatively late in the evening, one of them asked for a song that no one knew. The piano player was willing to indulge her, but with the proviso that she was going to sing it, because no one else was going to. She agreed.

And as the rest of us sat there, chatting quietly or going to get a drink, a genuine moment unfolded. She knew that song, and it clearly meant something to her, because it just poured out. As she went on the room slowly went quiet. Though none of us knew her or the song, we all had the sense of being in the presence of something real and special.

Some of the piano players at Marie’s like to kid that it’s “gay church”. It’s a great line, but also there are these moments like that where the normal jolly trumbling along really does fall away and we’re suddenly some place deeper. It doesn’t happen all the time, which is also a lot like church. Deborah moves as she will. (Shout out for Deborah!)

But when it does happen, it’s a sacred thing.

A couple weeks later I was back at the bar, sitting on one of those stools. A friend asked me what I was going to sing. Marie’s is not a solo bar, it’s group-sing, but early in the evening (or when someone picks a song no one knows) there are exceptions. I don’t generally do solos. But I’d been listening to the musical Parade, and discovered a couple songs in there that felt like they were right in my range.

So, together with my friend, we sang them. And while it was definitely not a moment like I had witnessed a couple weeks before, still, it felt so unexpectedly good to sing out like that. I can’t totally explain it; neither song seemed exactly personal to me. It was really just the act of singing, of letting everything inside me pour out into a song that felt right. That sense of release, of not having to hold anything back or in.

It used to be that there were many many gay piano bars in the Village and elsewhere. Many of them were within a two-minute walk of Stonewall when the riots happened. And I wonder if Stonewall wasn’t another version of what happens in those bars (and the reason that those bars have been such a source of solace for LGBTQ people for so long)—a moment of being set free, floodgates long held finally unlocked and released. Like finally you get to express your whole self, perhaps even allow yourself to be your whole self. We might not even know how much of us there is until we have a moment like that.

I’ve been thinking maybe that specific kind of experience is at the root of the queer community’s use of the word “pride”. Pride is the self-regard and self-love that comes naturally when you have that wondrous experience of your whole self out there and expressed. And it’s the feeling of awe and humility that comes when you witness it happening in someone else.

This pride, I think it’s the sort of thing you can’t really anticipate or understand until it’s happened to you. It’s the definition of revelation. Something happens, and it changes everything.

We say “Happy Pride” like “Happy Thanksgiving.” But it’s also a description of what this pride is, what it generates inside us, an astonishing and unexpected, overflowing sense of rightness and contentment.

---

I’ll be dropping the July Wowmanac for subscribers on Wednesday, then I’ll be off a week while I try to a couple projects done. Enjoy the 4^th!

In the meantime, here’s a couple places you can find me (and also Marie’s Crisis!):

• I did a piece for NCR on the new movie It’s Dorothy, which examines how both the character of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Judy Garland have been a source of encouragement and empowerment for the queer community and others;

• Over at TheaterWow, I had the chance to interview gay New York City playwright and incredibly wonderful all-around-guy Duncan Pflaster, who is doing some of the most interesting and provocative work around;

• I’ve got a piece about some great new films profiling trans people coming over at Sapientia next week;

• My friend Grace Kelleher wrote a beautiful piece about Marie’s Crisis in The Village Voice, and included me amongst those she talked to;

• To my shock, a script I wrote was picked as one of Out in Hollywood’s top unproduced gay pilots for 2025; Variety had a write-up last week.

Hope you all have a great Pride!