... a Caribbean upbringing can make you familiar with public enactments of overt sexuality, notwithstanding restrictive colonisation of the collective mind via instilled religious text ... if you've attended explicit Jamaican dancehall street-events, or sweaty Trini Soca carnivals, you can attest: public fora where carnal expression asserts license to step out and override long established standards of Judeo-Christian moral propriety ...
... correspondingly, such contrast is also observed in Canada, a Commonwealth pillar with a cold, staid rep - it's demonstrably apparent around increasingly outre Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) populations flourishing in Canadian cities, in particular, those hosting annual festivals dubbed PRIDE ...
... well, clearly, some men have as much pride in their buttocks as some women have in their breasts, if I'm to guage by the range of al fresco body parts on display during unavoidable PRIDE celebrations in Toronto (that is unless you're mayor Rob Ford, who's sure to be awol for the fun) ... in fairness, urban nudity may be as much about personal liberation as exhibitionism, but one can't be sure of motive, thereby stoking opinion, pro and con ...
... the relative anonimity of an outdoor street-festival, in a mixed crowd, swollen by thrill-seeking out-of-towners and local looky-loos, supports a carefree approach to romping revelry, so it shouldn't be at all surprising to find the full gamut of expression, in search of what amounts to hedonistic un-selfconsciousness ...
... a band of putative pussies, calling themselves Vag Halen, cranking out rock covers, was on one side of a stand of unisex port-a-potties ... on the other side was a parking-lot session blaring hip-hop and gruff dancehall (uh huh, dancehall - as in triple-threat Beenie, Bounty and Buju, a newly-out Diana King and the somewhat gayly-named Terror Fabulous) ...
... this suggests that a not-so-silent detente in sexual politics, a sort of gradual gay glasnost, is actually possible at a grass-roots level, if our drift to judgement is left to Jah. Even conceding that, on some level, we can all be given to subjective prejudice ...
... it's been a couple dozen years since I was first exposed to this culture by a secure lesbian cousin ... proximity to related events in Vancouver, L.A. and Sydney hadn't enticed me back, so this time I noted certain significant developments ... cliches remain, evident in droves, but the crowds today tend to be augmented by families and observers who can see the specter of "queer" without feeling hatred, rancor or threat ... to say that this occasion was inclusive, if a tad raunchy, would be an understatement ...
... piggy-backing, as PRIDE does, with Canada Day's exultant, flying Maple Leaf ensigns, ubiquitous beavers and mooses, helps to compound a general theme of celebration ... still, the most prevalent personal identifiers were rainbow-hued hairstyles, tats, tits, tit-tats and tiaras, with the occasional mustachioed cowboy dude swinging his lasso at submissive lasses for good measure ...
... in the bigger window of a wider world, notable homo-promo avowals by the likes of media-personalities Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon have become expected, if not commonplace, affecting neither their respective credibilities, such as they are, nor the proverbial price of rice in China ... much less, corrupting our impressionable youth at home or abroad ...
... talented, emergent R&B poet/singer Frank Ocean, who has made similar revelations, may actually raise his stock by doing so proactively ... Generation Next will always look back at the seductive sixties sexual revolution and Haight-Ashbury's hippie, free-love-in-the-park sensibility as a template to dress up or down as it chooses ... after all, is "choice" not the key to freedom? ...
... United States President Barack Obama's recent ballsy pronouncement, in regard to his personal views on same-sex marriage, is unlikely to stem opposition to this type of union, due to dominant heterosexual perspective ... however, the more these concepts get an airing, in America, Canada or the Caribbean, is the less shocking they become, just as images of topless women, references to vaginas, penises and natural body-functions, are, in time, likely to make fewer people blanch or blush ...
