Tuesday, July 01, 2014

Erin Go Gay

It's easy to dismiss the importance of certain clearly symbolic victories, but for anyone who studies the history of the Irish in NYC, and the US generally, this is not nothing:
A gay group of employees from NBC will march in next year’s New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade behind their own banner, a source with knowledge of the ongoing parade controversy has told the Irish Voice....

In a historic move aimed at defusing the storm that erupted this year over the exclusion of gay banners in the march, the addition of a banner identifying gay NBC staffers is a compromise forged at the insistence of several New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee members, including Dr. John Lahey, president of Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, and Francis X. Comerford, chief revenue officer for NBC-owned TV stations.

It is of course grimly hilarious that intricate diplomacy was required to finally persuade a crowd of Hibernian fossil bigots to concede that homosexuals might be sufficiently Irish enough to march in a fucking parade. For fuck's sake, you'd think it was Ulster and the IRA burying the Armalites, and not a fucking parade in another fucking country.

I might actually go to the NYC parade this year. I long ago swore I wouldn't go until Gay Freedom, but really that was a cover, as I couldn't be arsed anyhow. Loud drunk white people from Long Island sporting plastic shamrocks, fuck that. Perhaps I am no longer sufficiently pious a Catholic regardless of this recent gay-march toleration. Ochone!