Below is the tale of OiP editor Megan Smith’s first Perth Pride Parade. At OUTinPerth, we’d like to hear about your favourite Pride moments… Comment below on your best moments!
There were Courtesans from the Court. There were Polar Bears searching for a home. There were sexy, pillow-fighting, white-clad safe sexsters from WA Aids Council ( I tried to wave hi friends on the float but they were a bit too busy being sexy really). There were a range of animals and masks so ornate and so stunning that we didn’t even need to know the theme, from Connections. There were the four Western Australian public bastions of higher learning proudly representing Hogwarts and its freshly outed headmaster Dumbledore. There were the puppets reminiscent of Mardi Gras from the environmentally conscious Freedom Centre. There were the worker’s rights groups, the Greens, and the ALP showing solidarity and wooing the pink vote. And last, or should, I say first, there were the ladies of leather, the Dykes on Bikes, who with a roar and a rev, got the party started.
Then, of course, there was me, virgin of Perth Pride, who, dressed as Paris Hilton, rode through Northbridge while a sexy faux-member of the SWAT team beat me with her baton and occasionally danced in a mature-audience only way. That’s right, I had chosen to take in my first Perth parade from atop the Gay and Lesbian Community Service float – Keep Paris Hilton Out of L.A. Jail. After all, what better way to Imagine One Better World than with Paris Hilton still at large? And what better way to take in Pride than gyrating and waving to the people of Perth who were game enough to brave a rain that would send even seasoned Melbournites indoors?
While I have heard time and again that Perth is not Sydney, both the rain and the spirit (even if the scale was a wee bit smaller) definitely captured that of our larger neighbours to the east. And as we neared the main intersection of William and James St, a sea of people, gay, straight and otherwise craned their necks, danced along and celebrated the diversity we have here in Western Australia. When a middle-aged woman came chased down our float waving, I thought ‘now, here is either a woman with a burning desire to be surrounded by a few dozen Paris Hiltons or a mother who wants to spend Pride with her daughter.’ Turns out it was both. The mother in her ‘My daughter’s gay and I’m proud’ (I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea) T-shirt put on her daughter’s blond wig, flipped her hair off her face and beaming, waved like only a maniacally proud mother can. And that was the moment that inevitably comes at all Pride parades, when I fill up with that cornball, goosebumpy warmth that makes me want to hug random strangers in the street.
Later that night, as the parties got underway, Perth Pride veterans, including my girlfriend (after she had demasked as a law enforcement agent) proclaimed this year’s parade a grand effort and the floats noticeable notch up from 2006. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but wonder what 2008 would bring – hopefully clear skies, but then when it came down to it, for my first WA Pride nothing could really rain on my parade.
