City raises flag for gay rights, as it does every year

The gray clouds hanging around City Hall Friday noon could do nothing to dispel Mayor Cherelle Parker’s PA-enforced cheerfulness as she announced the start of LGBTQ+ Pride Month (October), plus National Coming Out Day (Oct. ll.)

Pride Month is designed to make gays feel good about themselves, and for their rights as Americans.

As the Coming Out part, all I can say is almost all the parents of gays I know said, “We know” when their child came out.

But I know, too, not from personal experience, that some parents can’t handle it.

Cher, for one. When her sweet daughter Chastity decided she was actually male, Cher freaked out.

And stayed freaked out for quite a while, before realizing she would rather have a relationship with her son, Chaz, than nothing. And Cher is a hard liberal, not a Bible pounder.

So the Coming Out day may be like the November Quit Smoking day, where people who are carrying a burden can help each other, along with support of their allies.

The annual Friday event was to last 90 minutes, culminating with a flag raising,.

Honestly, I’ve seen flags raised before and I had other things to do, so I cut out after the mayor pledged a bias-free administration, and announced (gulp) the addition of nineteen members to join the six currently on the Mayor’s Advisory Board on LGBTQ+ Affairs.

They are to represent a cross section of the LGBTQ+ community and will serve without compensation. 

The second speaker, Philadelphia Gay News Publisher Mark Segal, who was at the Stonewall Riot that lit the fuse for gay rights, reminded the assembled that gays have always been part of the American experience. The Continental Congress, Segal said, wanted to deny a pension to Prussian Baron Friedrich Wilhem Von Steuben, who reorganized the rag tag Continental Army into a disciplined military force.

 Some Colonials objected to his “morals,” because he was gay, Segal said.

Gen. George Washington wrote a letter saying that without Von Steuben there would be no America.

Rue Landau, the first openly gay person to be elected to City Council (there had been at least two closeted gays before), jokingly referred to herself as “Mark’s little sister,” but sincerely talked about the impact he has had on his native city.

[Personal disclosure: Segal has been one of my closest friends for about 50 years.] 

Speeches were interspersed with a couple of drag performers, before the LGBTQ+ flag was raised, fluttering in the wind of perhaps the most gay-friendly city in America.