After returning to home-base in the Mid-West I now am able to consider the weekend that we spent in Louisville, Kentucky. Our family has visited Louisville a number of times to be with old friends who reside there. Also, we support the recognition of the LGBTQ+ community for Pride month in June. Louisville features a delightful Pride parade and a festival which follows. The festival is a short walk from downtown by the Ohio River.

I ponder at some length the reasons I am drawn to the gay community. Family members and friends are members of that community. Over the years I have always sensed a welcome, felt included without any exception.

I am, have always been a “straight” guy. That dimension of existence is important, but it is personal, and is no one’s business, precisely because the “soul” is the most intimate, a sacred space in the psyche. The psyche is dynamic, influencing and being influenced by social circumstance, relationships in our past and those at present. What is one to do? What am I to do? Existence is not chosen, – I didn’t decide to live, to be here. I just am! Nor is gender, any of the points along the spectrum — a matter of one’s choosing. That’s a given too. A fact to which everyone caring about truth will concede. 

So I ask myself again, “What ought I to do?”  Well… to do nothing at all seems appropriate. The life-style, the behavioral orientation, the expression of meaning which others offer comes as an aspect of experience to be recognized. There’s nothing to be “corrected” or blindly approved. Simply observe, learn, empathically receive human stories laden with difference. Do nothing, – except to wave, to gesture, to shout “I see you!” And learn.

Isn’t that what we all want? That is: to be seen and to be heard. And such is a basis for our moral solidarity with the “things” living and non-living, of nature as well as with one another. My better judgment indicates this is the grass-roots attitude out of which a sustainable future is generated, – created through day-by-day living biased towards a gentle decency. I mean to say that propriety is a practice of caring.

I took as many photos of the parade as I could. The beginning photos are of our family anticipating the arrival of the parade. In the interest of candor, not everyone is unequivocally supportive of Pride month. One individual with a tall cross positioned himself making a statement of opposition, viewing participants and parade viewers as violators of god’s laws. The Christian/Calvinist statement was opposed by someone dressed in drag, loudly contending with him. I saved several of these images for the end of the photo series.

Do respond with a comment about these matters if you are inclined. Disagreement need not be adversarial! I will say more tomorrow.