Pride Saturday in SF today (including some events that my grand-daughter will take part in); then the parade tomorrow (which I will watch via the miracle of live streaming by KPIX); then on Monday the 25th, the birthday of Saint George Michael of the Beverly Tearoom, the patron saint of parks at night; and finally on Thursday the 28th, actual Stonewall Day (recalling the Stonewall Inn riots of 1969).
For today: two kinds of rainbow food (rainbow cupcakes and rainbow roll sushi); Pride underwear, including two lines of rainbow underwear; and an entertaining accessory (a pink triangle pin, another creation in a long tradition of slogan buttons, stickers, patches, banners, etc. as well as nonverbal designs: the various Pride flags, the plain pink triangle, lavender-colored objects, etc., including my Forever Gay pin).
Rainbow cupcakes. These appeared in my life yesterday as Mystery Cupcakes, wrapped in aluminum foil in a package outside my door (I had been away at yet another medical appointment). A set of five, each cupcake with rainbow-colored strips of cake — with little umbrellas in five colors, plus rainbow striped napkins, all on a rainbow plate. Totally gay-festive. Photos by Kim Darnell:
(#1) Rainbow surprise
(#2) Rainbow surprise, side view in close-up
No message or anything identifying the giver of the cupcakes, but then I got a phone call from the responsible person, Sharon Gray of Aging Life Care California, the company that provides the services of Juan Gomez for me. A delight!
Rainbow rolls. I’m considering getting some of these tomorrow from Whole Foods (if they’re not sold out), as the appropriate food to eat while watching the Pride parade. Sort of the queer counterpart to guacamole and nachos for watching the Superbowl.
In any case, I see that I haven’t posted about the rainbow roll, a kind of second-level form of totally American sushi: a California roll (an American form of makizushi) with toppings as in nigirizushi.
Three different realizations of the rainbow roll concept:
(#3)
(#4)
(#5)
Each is a California roll with seafood toppings: tuna (red), salmon (orange), and one or two others (from such possibilities as red snapper, shrimp, halibut, and eel), plus avocado for green.
You can see the California role bases clearly in these photos. From Wikipedia:
A California roll or California maki is a makizushi sushi roll, usually made inside-out, containing cucumber, crab meat or imitation crab, and avocado. Sometimes crab salad is substituted for the crab stick, and often the outer layer of rice in an inside-out roll (uramaki) is sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds, tobiko or masago (capelin roe).
As one of the most popular styles of sushi in Canada and the United States, the California roll has been influential in sushi’s global popularity and in inspiring sushi chefs around the world in creating their non-traditional fusion cuisine.
The identity of the creator of the California roll is disputed, with chefs from Vancouver and Los Angeles claiming credit.
The California roll often serves as an introduction to sushi for non-Japanese who are wary of raw fish: the crab or crab-substitute in it is cooked (and the cucumber and avocado are familiar and unthreatening to Americans).
The Daily Jocks sale of premium-brand homounderwear for this year:
(#6)
Rather than explore these brands, all of which I’ve posted about here, I branched out to find more rainbow underwear, beyond the mini boxers, jockstraps with rainbow pouches, and rainbow things I’ve already looked at here. Two finds: the Tomboy X line, and LOBBO underwear.
Tomboy X. Two items from their line: iconic briefs and 6″ boxer briefs; they also offer 4.5″ trunks, 9″ boxer briefs, and Stride With Pride socks:
(#7)
(#8) Just a note: that’s a faux fly
The company is a hoot (and they make clothes designed to fit well for both women and men). Their manifesto:
(#9)
(#10)
By women, for people.
The LOBBO company appears to be more conventionally homowear-oriented. Two of their offerings for Pride:
(#11) Gay Pride briefs, with prominent rainbow pouch
(#12) Tie-dye rainbow boxers
I found nothing useful about the company, beyond a discovery about its name, orat least its logo, as here:
(#13) Think ABBA
So the first B is reversed — making a butterfly.
The accessories of gay life: Adam Kurtz’s pink triangle. Breakfast this morning with daughter Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky and grand-daughter Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky, OEAZ all a-quiver over going off to SF for various Saturday Pride celebrations, with Maggie Ainsworth-Darnell and some of Maggie’s friends. Maggie, born during Atlanta Pride (taking place right outsde the hospital windows), was celebrating her 18th birthday. The young women were immersed in lbgt+ signs, symbols, and slogans: rainbow leis, glitter, pins and patches on their clothes, full -out joyous celebration of genderqueerness in many of its forms. Including this Adam Kurtz adaptation of the (gay) pink triangle:
(#14)
From Kurtz’s website:
Gay and Boring enamel pin: The pink triangle has been a symbol of gay pride and activism for decades, and thanks to those who came before us, LGBTQ folks now have more rights than ever before. The work isn’t over, but we’re getting closer and closer.
One of those rights is the right to be BORING AS HELL. Sure, we’re fantastic, sassy, fabulous, and all those exciting words. But we’re also just plain old people who wanna stay home and watch TV while scrolling Instagram explore page on the couch next to our partner… and that’s our right too. *arm flex emoji*
1″ pin with pink enamel fill has a rubber grip on the back to reduce slipping.
It was one of many messages the young women conveyed via their dress.
Personal note. Kim remarked to me that she couldn’t have imagined doing anything like what Opal and Maggie were doing when she was their age. Noting that I am over 25 years older than Opal’s mother Elizabeth and Maggie’s mother Kim, I allowed that anything like this would have been quite simply inconceivable when I was the girls’ age.
Maggie has just finished high school and is getting ready to go off to college. When that happened to me, I was already largely self-running, and then, 60 years ago this month, I took on one of the major trappings of full adulthood: a real job, 40 hours a week with fixed hours (distinctly odd ones because I was working on an evening newspaper that went to press for the first edition at 2 p.m.), a minimum wage (then 75¢/hr.), deductions for Social Security, the responsiility for getting myself to and from the job on my own and getting my own lunch, managing my own daily schedule and budgeting for expenses, the whole thing. I was 17 (became 18 only at the end of the summer), and I understood that I’d need to take on further jobs (I mostly had three at a time) if I was to work my way through Princeton.
That makes me sound independent and self-sufficient, and in fact to an astonishing degree I was. But of course none of it would have been possible without innumerable sacrifices on my parents’ part, and the firm support, over many years, of my family, my friends, my teachers, and my community. I was nurtured and encouraged at every step of the way. And then largely, but gently, set free to find my own way. (Though with the understanding that everybody had my back.)
At the time — 1958 — there were people who managed to construct lives outside the norms of gender and sexuality, but only in coded ways and in hidden communities and often at high cost (The Boys in the Band went on stage in 1968). The idea that a teenager might present themselves as, say, pansexual, and have that treated as a significant fact about them, but not necessarily more significant than, say, a passionate commitment to political action, to playing basketball, to gaming, or to jamming with their rock band — now, that’s truly new.
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