Gay Pride

This past weekend, I attended Marseille’s very own Gay Pride parade. I can’t find any official stats on how many people participated (in fact, I can’t find any journalistic mention of it at all), but it was approximately a lot.

Actually, I was quite surprised at the turnout. Marseille, while not a hate-filled pit of homophobia, is no San Francisco. As mentioned here before, there are a lot of North African immigrants living in the city, especially around the port, and with these immigrants often comes a rather strong sense of macho-ism which tends to conflict with gay pride.

French men are pretty inscrutable in terms of their sexuality – that is, a guy who would be wildly gay in the US is just your everyday straight man here in France (cf: Gay or European). Men’s jeans are tight and sometimes awfully form-fitting, and often have little zippers plastered along the back pockets. Les Français, especially the obnoxious adolescent demographic, carry these absurd purse-bag things – about the size of a paperback book and shaped exactly like one, with an over-the-shoulder strap that they sling across their bodies like you might a messenger bag. But the strap itself is never long enough for the bag to hang down a good, manly distance to the upper thigh; instead, they leave the bags squarely over their small intestines (and always in the front). It’s an entirely impractically-sized bag, unless you need something small to carry your wallet and lipstick in because your pants pockets aren’t big enough.

Anyway, apart from the fact that my gaydar is completely out of whack, Marseille is not a place where everyone’s here, queer, and proud of it. (I know of exactly one not-straight person at the University, much unlike Brown…) But it seems the gay and allied Marseillaise population crawled out of the woodwork for this parade, and it was a pretty nifty affair. Lots of flag-flying, rock-music-rumbling, soap-shooting, and condom-chucking. (How ya like them alliteratives?)

Along the parade route, I ran into a (very obviously gay) guy from New York City. We got to talking, and one of the first things he asked me was, “Do you have a boyfriend here in France?” This contrasted with the first question he asked everyone else, perhaps more sensibly, namely, “Are you gay?” Apparently he had it on good authority in the form of advance warning from Cindy that I was the straightest girl around.