Share your Pride with the world … or at least all of Atlanta.
We’re looking for your photos from this week’s Pride festivities. Send them to pridephotos@creativeloafing.com, and we will feature them in our Pride photo gallery at clatl.com/photos. We’ll be at the festival Saturday and Sunday, too, so stop by the Creative Loafing booth and we’ll see you this weekend.
(Photo by Joeff Davis)
Dr. Fifi: I’m OK with it. It’s two gay holidays together. It would be nice to have some warmer weather, but I’m just happy to be back in Piedmont Park. It’s National Coming Out Day, and National Coming Out Month in October. That has a lot of significance. I heard a lot of people are traveling to Atlanta Pride because it is in October. More people will be here. Any time we come together as a community we’re strengthened. I’d prefer June, but the fact that we get it back in Piedmont Park, it really doesn’t matter to me when it is.
Ken: It’s an abomination. Gay Pride is the anniversary of Stonewall. Stonewall is in June, not October. It has nothing to do with Halloween. It has to do with significant events in the Gay calendar and significant events that happened in June. That’s part of our history. We don’t change history. I’m all about Piedmont Park. However, you need to honor what you need to honor, and location is not the reason we do this. I am ashamed of the Pride Committee for agreeing to this. I know people on the committee that are my friends, and I am ashamed.
Chris: Piedmont Park would only let us to do [this] weekend, and it turned out to be Halloween. Having it on Halloween will inspire people to dress up more, participate more, and it will be a lot more fun than everybody sweating in the heat in June. Having it at the different time of year does not take away from what happened at Stonewall. Around the country, Gay Pride has been celebrated at different times. It makes no difference in remembering those that were at Stonewall. We always have those thoughts with us, whatever month it would be.
(Photos by Jeff Slate)
Emory University’s student newspaper, The Emory Wheel, has a great story looking back at LGBT relations on campus in advance of next weekend’s Atlanta Pride Festival. The story begins in the mid-1980s. While there were LGBT people and organizations on campus, visibility was low.
That all changed with one simple act.
In December 1991 an incident occurred that helped propel the development of the presence of an LGBT community at Emory: Undergraduate students Alfred Hildebrand and Michael Norris kissed in Thomas Hall and were consequently harassed by other students because of their homosexuality.
“[The other students] said things like, ‘Die f—–s’ and ‘You’ll burn in hell,’” Hildebrand recounted in a 1991 issue of Southern Voice, Atlanta’s LGBT newspaper that launched in 1988.
More than 50 same-sex couples walked down the aisle at the Atlanta Pride Festival Commitment Ceremony Saturday.
Some couples donned white gowns, while others wore shorts and sneakers at the rather informal event. With partners exchanging rings and wedding vows, the event closely resembled a wedding ceremony. Couples received commitment certificates and danced to Etta James’s “At Last” – a wedding classic – at the reception.
After the interfaith ceremony, led by a religious leaders wearing rainbow-colored scarves, couples received private blessings in their preferred religious traditions.
For some couples like Ivy Nia and Shaun Everhart, the ceremony was a stepping stone to becoming legally married. Shaun says the couple is thinking of going to California “to make it extra-legal.”
For others like Joanna Camper, who drew a crowd before the event by dressing her partner Anissa in a headpiece with rainbow-colored ribbons and a hand-made shawl, the ceremony was a way to rekindle their commitment.
In a state where gay marriage is outlawed, the ceremony was symbolic rather than legal. But that didn’t stop couples from yelling, “We’re married!” at the end of what the Rev. Tessie Mandeville of Christ Covenant Metropolitan Community Church called a “subversive” ceremony that recognizes love under God without discrimination.
(Photo by Michelle Ye Hee Lee)
Today’s Air Loaf features CL’s Chanté LaGon and Scott Freeman discuss this week’s cover story: Pride and patriotism.
Air Loaf is broadcast weekdays on 1690 WMLB-AM at approximately 8:10 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 6:20 p.m.
Paul Broun’s showing was, quite frankly, nothing less of stunning and something that both Democrats and Republicans never considered.
— JMAC at Safe as Houses on yesterday’s special election to fill the vacant Georgia 10th Congressional District seat. Republican Jim Whitehead got 44% of the vote. Once all of the votes are counted, he will face either Republican Paul Broun Jr. or Democrat James Marlow in a July 17 run-off. With 96% of the vote counted late last night, Broun and Marlow had 20.7% and 20.3%, respectively.
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So, as I’m planning my schedule for the NECC, I just realized a huge conflict: NECC pre-conference events are on Pride weekend. How am I to watch the parade and hear the opening keynote?!
— Megan Golding is trying to figure out how she’s going to watch Sunday’s Pride Parade without missing one of the big speeches at the National Educational Computing Conference at the World Congress Center.
Forget speeches! What about the NECC’s six-hour “library crawl” on Sunday?! Complete with brown-bag lunches! Who’d wanna miss that?
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Yesterday at lunch I got Snapple Real Fact #116 and I cringed a little bit:
#116 – The largest fish is the whale shark – It can be over 50 feet long and weigh 2 tons.
— Seth at Metroblogging Atlanta evidently forgot to bring a book to lunch. CL guest blogger Mei Lan wrote about whale sharks yesterday.
