I started to write something highfalutin about the progression of Pride, Protest, and the Military parade that happened in DC last week. I had nearly 3000 words written, but it felt disjointed, overstuffed, and unfocused. Unfixable.
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I do not know how to reconcile that a Pride parade happened in Washington D.C. at the same time as Federal programs are eradicating sexual orientation and gender identity data from their datasets. I am not sure what I should take away from a Starbucks float rolling down 14th street while a few blocks away someone is cooking up a plan to strip resources for queer people out of the 988 hotline.
I went to Pride for an hour. I spent some of that day laying on my couch telling myself I wouldn’t bother going, because I was in a poor mood and didn’t want to run into anyone. I settled on going for an hour, and on taking the train south and walking around the terminus of the parade.
I’m glad I did. Despite my allergen to crowds and recent grumpiness, it was nice to see happiness. Nice to see people express themselves and feel uncowed by the people in power that sit all around the parade streets.
I went expecting to see the usual corporate performatism, mentally preparing myself to be pissed off at a Lockheed Martin float while having to tell myself that the people in the parade aren’t the baddies. I don’t know if it was because I was late, at the near end of the route, or because WorldPride substituted some Corporations for Real People (the New Orleans float was the best I saw, a big Alligator), but I only saw a Hyatt and then a Starbucks float. I found this interesting because I always thought of Hilton as the gayest hotel chain, and certainly Starbucks isn’t the gayest coffeeshop. Perhaps they’re allies.
I loved WMATA’s section, though it has not made up for what sometimes feels like a direct personal attack towards me with their Better Bus system redesign. I hope that bus driver that slams on his breaks and nearly kills me several days a week wasn’t the person driving their bus. My guess is, since there were no killings, he wasn’t.
The joys of Pride felt quite pure, fun.
The protest didn’t feel pure and fun. There was a distinct feeling of abandonment in the little crowd at Logan Circle around 1:30, when I arrived on the 14th. The 50501/No Kings organizers had decreed that no protests should take place in the capital of the country. Supposedly because they wanted to draw attention away from DC, or because of concerns of violence—as if violence is not already occurring—or out of a fear that the protest’s numbers may somehow be counted among those of Trump’s Boondoggle. As if Trump needs a reason to lie about numbers.
If it isn’t clear, I find these reasons at best befuddling and at worst enraging. A massive protest marching on the White House would not have taken away from the empty grandstands at the military parade, or the empty fields. I think it is a lost opportunity. C’est la vie.
Circling the protest, I was surprised most of all by the lack of police presence. I had expected much more, and much more interested cops. When I arrived, a cadre of them were leaning on bicycles appearing bored and hot, in need of an air conditioner and an iced coffee (much like myself). I watched a few protesters talk to them, and there never appeared to be any agitation. They all seemed cooperative and pleasant, standing around while the speakers rallied the crowd.
I thought the speakers were good, though some of the ideas struck me as incongruous. One declared that it was “too late” to wait for the Congress and the Courts, that TRUMP MUST GO NOW—a mantra they changed throughout the march. She declared that ‘we must declare our independence from Trump’s fascist United States.’ I thought this sounded a little secessionist and for that reason also a little kooky, and was again disappointed that there wasn’t a much larger protest organized by folks that weren’t quite so closely aligned with the Revolutionary Communist Party (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
Ultimately, I was just glad that *someone* had decided that maybe it would be a good idea to have an organized counter message to Trump’s fit of narcissism. When the March progressed through town and landed at a mostly fenced off Lafayette Park, most of us glistened with sweat and I will tell you the place stunk with body odor, as any good protest should.
Though, really, who am I to say what a good protest should and should not be?
Any joy at the military parade, which in my mind is named Trump’s Boondoggle, was the manic kind more familiar to me from working in acute psychiatric care. Which is not to say that the people there were crazy, but some of them behaved much like the adolescent boys I used to work with.
At Pride, people were typically happy to have their photo taken, had no reaction, or politely turned away. The same was true at the protest, despite my handwringing about the ethics of photography at these things. I found at the Boondoggle, people were not exactly happy, but at times pesteringly insistent that they be the center of attention. I did not reward this bad behavior.
For example, walking down Connecticut, I stopped to take a picture of a protester with a rather provocative sign featuring Trump combing up his hair to reveal a swastika, SAVE OUR DEMOCRACY in big letters at the top. Doing that, a guy took his hat off his head and pushed it in front of my camera, “Want to take a picture of THIS one?” I offered a curt, “no.”
A friend and I spoke to the protester with the sign and I consider them inspirational. They had been told by security to cover up a smaller sticker in the lower left that some may consider violent. It looked like this:
I have searched my ethics, and while Asimov may tell you that Violence is the last refuse of the incompetent, I do not think that the above sticker is quite what he had in mind. Besides, my favorite part of the Indiana Jones films has always been when Harrison Ford punches out Nazis.
As it happens, the person above was a counterprotester at January 6. We ran into someone else that claimed to be there. While my friend and I strolled the rather barren Mall, a windbreakered man with wraparound Wal-Mart sunglasses strode into another with a camera and had a chat. My friend, a journalist, had the good sense to listen while I simply took pictures. His windbreaker said “ICE”— my friend called this stolen valor, to which I would add gigantic quotation marks.
They asked me if I recognized the name they’d heard, I didn’t. All we got was “Brandon.” Supposedly the man was a proud boy and one of those that been in the Capital. Let’s go, Brandon. Isn’t it almost too good to be true? I didn’t find anyone named ‘Brandon’ pardoned by Trump.
Thankfully, better company was to be found on our walk through the Mall. For example, there were many friends to be found at the empty fields of portapotties. “Good god, it’s empty,” I believe I said, cresting a hill to find them in the distance.
Not until we ventured far into the southeast corner did we finally find a noticeable group of people (and, I should be fair, we were there around 4 or 5 o’clock):
A man passing on his phone, “Dude, the longest line is ironically for the Mexican food truck.” My friend and I both scrambled to write this gem down, them in their phone and I on a notepad like a gumshoe in a 40’s detective comic.
We spoke to several other counterprotesters, one had traveled from Chicago and his sign looked like someone had taken huge bites out of it. I asked him if he could tell me what happened, and apparently he’d been in the shot of a pundit’s camera and someone tried to rip the sign down. The sign didn’t say anything shocking, only TRUMP IS A RAPIST, in big letters.
A very kind pair traveled from Vermont, and when we spoke to them, they had not been harassed at all. I hope this was true for the rest of their evening. I asked if I could take their picture. They were as kind as they look:
The actual parade was rather droll. Soldiers marched in period costume and occasionally this provoked strange anachronisms. For example, how many of Trump’s people would be supporting the Union Blue back in the 1860s? And if those folks in the Vietnam era costume had paraded through their towns in 1975, would they have been spat on by these people in today’s crowd?
The military hardware is, unfortunately, undeniable. I don’t think years of playing Call of Duty can prepare you quite for how big a tank is. We saw some of the little ones rolling up through the ages, but when the modern armor arrived, with their furrowed headlamps and angrylooking designs, the fascination with size became apparent.
At one point (in the WWII section), I was near a French family, who called out in thick accents, “Bravo!” I wondered dimly if they’d supported Le Pen.
Of course, all of this starts with the French. Trump went over and watched one of their military parades and was so taken with the Daft Punk medley that he thought we could create something similar. Alas, our history is so different. And Daft Punk broke up.
This isn’t what I wanted it to be. Some kind of reflection on these three events and their bizarre juxtaposition, an opinion or criticism that would prove worth reading. I hope that the photos convey more than my words can, right now, anyway.
Perhaps what I can end with is a conversation that I had with a man just as I arrived through the security checkpoint on June 14th. My friend’s water bottle had been deemed too dangerous to be allowed in the immediate vicinity of a military parade, so I sat below the statue of Bolivar and waited for them to go and hide it somewhere for future collection. Across from me sat an older white man, probably in his fifties. Jeans and a short-sleeve button down. I thought he looked like any other farmer I’d have grown up across the street from, in rural Illinois.
He started talking to me, unprompted, from across the way. He sounded a lot like a farmer, too. I asked what he thought of all this, and he said he was expecting something else. He explained that he’d thought he could get up close and see the tanks and the equipment. I said, I think they’re staged along the basin until the parade. Well, he asked, if you can’t see them what’s the point? I don’t know what to think about it.
I asked him if he was local, or if he’d traveled far. He said he came from Northern Virginia, and we chit chatted back and forth. He asked if I was a press person. No, just a hobbyist. Something about him made me ask if he’d heard about the assassinations in Minnesota that’d happened earlier that morning. He hadn’t, and I shared what little I knew: that a man dressed as a cop had knocked on the doors of two legislators and shot them and their spouses.
“They were a couple?”
No, I explained, my understanding is he did one and then the other. I said I didn’t think they’d caught him yet.
He sighed heavily and appeared disturbed. He asked me if I’d heard of the translator that’d killed a cop. I said no, and he shared what he knew of that story. An Afghani interpreter had worked for the military, and come over after his service, bringing his family. The man couldn’t find a job, couldn’t support his family, and one day got pulled over for some little reason. The man shot at the cop and was, in turn, shot to death. The man across from me explained that the interpreter had said he’d had enough.
“People are desperate,” he said. To my surprise, he was not enraged at the immigrant, or enraged at anything. He seemed diminished. He said, the man couldn’t find a job. He had a family.
He felt empathy. This is what I hang on to, from this long and strange week.
Thomas
A Note on the Photos
The photographs were all captured on a Nikon F4. Nearly all of the photos were taken with a Nikkor AF-S 85mm lens. One or two with a Voigtlander Ultron 40mm. About half of the film is Kentmere 100, mostly shot at 400. The rest is Ilford’s FP4+, shot at 400. All film was developed in Ilfosol 3.