Role Models

So, like I said, the bff and I went to the Pride parade this weekend.

That is, the end of the parade, because everyone knows that twenty years can a. not go to bed before two on a Friday night and b. are damned if they'll wake up before nine.

The important thing is, we were at the rally afterward. In Arkansas heat. In June. On asphalt. We didn't stay the whole time, but we did see one girl pass out. Oh, South, we love you too.

It's always unsettling, not necessarily in a bad way, to go to Pride. I look around and wonder where all the pretty queers crawled out of the wood works, and I think I just need to get out more.

There were feminine girls, hot hot butch girls, a boy in a bikini, a former cheerleader from my high school holding hands with another girl, and then there was her.

I don't know this woman's name, and I never have. Let's just call her D, since she looks and acts like the forty year old Daria I aspire to be.

She works at a notorious used bookstore in the city near where I live, and she has since I was about fifteen. There's nothing about her that screams "Lesbian!" She's just a sarcastic, feminist bookstore employee who didn't bat an eye when I purchased books from the GLBT section, and actually recommended to me, after learning I was a musician, a songbook for Indigo Girls' "Nomads Indians Saints."

Still, in those five minutes I checked out at the bookstore, she would be my role model. Confident, swaggering through the bookstore, unafraid, grinning in her long shorts and wife beater without a bra.

Saturday we saw her at the rally, holding signs and holding hands with a pretty butch woman. I grabbed the bff's arm and pointed, saying "I knew it!" This woman, who I barely spoke to, was my role model that I only hoped was like me, when I only knew one girl like me (the one then standing next to me).

Later in the day it hit me. This woman has no idea what she meant to me; to her, I was probably another bratty hippie-looking kid coming into the bookstore to soak up the A/C and spend ten bucks.

And I wonder now if there are kids somewhere looking up to me. Makes me a little more nervous about my actions, to be honest, but also a little more determined. This woman was out there and confident and unafraid to offend because of who she was. So I should at least pay it forward to the teens now who look around, hoping to see someone else like them.