last sunday in june

It's too big (like the city), too loud (like the city), too crass, too crowded, too obsessed with sex and youth and beauty (like the city). But the gay pride parade is still, for me, the one moment that captures the fullness of this place, the pageantry and the enormity, the racial and ethic and cultural and political and religious range of people here, the history, the commercialism, the self-absorption and self-aggrandizement and unselfconsciousness about its self-importance; the earnest and the ridiculous, the old, the new, the imaginary. I love every bit of it, and I think it's the one day a year I unreservedly love New York.