Withering Glance on heroic Pride festivals of yore

Rick Nelson and Claude Peck dispense unasked-for advice about clothing, etiquette, culture, relationships, grooming and more.

CP: Today's LGBT Pride is to Pride of the early 1980s as a McMansion is to a sleeping bag.

RN: Oh, goodie, another one of Claude's Heroic Tales of Yesteryear. Does anyone have anything I can open a vein with?

CP: No, I'm pretty sure you have not heard this one.

RN: Right. Anyway …

CP: Pride was just getting underway, and I volunteered with Target City Coalition, its early organizer. This was back when Allan Spear was out at the Capitol but a dozen years before statewide gay rights passed in Minnesota.

RN: You're being a little vague about the year, but I believe I was attending Joseph P. Nicollet Junior High School at the time. Just to make it all about me for a second. You were saying?

RN: That is so Sally Field in "Norma Rae." I'm impressed.

CP: You should be, Sally Struthers. To get the live music in place for one block party, I drove a rented flatbed onto Hennepin Avenue with a rock band and its amps bungee-tied to the back.

RN: Wow. That's the butchest thing you've ever done.

CP: I almost knocked the bass player overboard when I hit a curb. The crowd was there, we plugged in and they started playing. I was probably wearing bracelets and a bandana-as-headband.

RN: Now, that's a visual. Please tell me that the band's name was Devo. Or the B-52s. Or Bronski Beat.

RN: I noticed the gays-going-mainstream in the late '90s. I was working the booth at the AIDS Emergency Fund/Every Penny Counts, and a nearby stand was hawking J.C. Penney credit card applications. St. John's Bay meets Loring Park!

CP: Guess we have done the same. Once editrix of the sharp-elbowed Q Monthly, you now write for our state's largest daily. Do you pine for the old days in your office with the Harvey Milk poster on the wall?

RN: That job was a riot, partly because it's where we met and became friends. Awwwwww.

CP: Even in the '90s, I remember the Pride parade being more spirited, less interminable. We had a blast marching with that giant rainbow flag into which bystanders threw money to help people living with HIV.

RN: Those were the days, mi amigo. Now I suppose you'll be watching the parade from the sidelines, carrying a thermos of vodka stingers and a disdain for the young'uns who don't know — much less appreciate — all that you did to make it possible for bodybuilders, God bless 'em, to strut the length of Hennepin Avenue wearing little more than a cotton ball and a few yards of dental floss.

E-mail: witheringglance@startribune.com