PERRY: Aurora shares in the Pride with its own dedication to LGBTQ inclusion, and fun

It’s amazing that it’s not so amazing that Aurora is celebrating its sixth annual Aurora Pride fest this weekend. 

Six years ago, I joined a lot of Aurora in wonderment as the first Aurora Pride rolled out on the steps of city hall.

The celebration was one of welcoming the thousands of family members, friends and neighbors who no longer had to feel they were less than anyone else in the city.

While a recent resurgence in homophobia and general hatred toward all kinds of minority communities has been unsettling and aggravating, a future of inclusion for all LGBTQ+ people is as reversible as women getting the vote.

Unlike so many others, I was fortunate in growing up in an era of general wonderment and having friends who were outright wonders.

My best pal in high school, Mike, taught me back in the 1970s how seriously dangerous being gay could be, and too often was. He was a famously smart and irksome guy who one day told me I had to be the most oblivious person on the planet to not know that he was gay, before he outright told me.

He laid it all out for me one day in a hospital emergency room while he was explaining that his dad had given him a black eye, swollen completely shut, a gashed lip and a cracked rib  — because his father had discovered Mike was gay.

He later said he’d long learned to live with gay slurs, but having the crap beat out of him hurt in a lot of ways he wanted no part of.

He eventually left home, afraid for his life. He took his stunning wit, generosity, practical jokes and intelligence to California.

I still miss him. He taught me everything about his humanity and mine.

Not long after high-school, I started losing friends to AIDS, one of the sickest episodes of cruelty in human history. I stood by and watched as friends became deathly ill and died. Often, their own families had long abandoned them.

I’ve been blown away, right along with my gay and lesbian friends, when they would complain about losing apartments, jobs, family, car loans, even restaurant reservations because of their sexuality.

A few years ago, when I heard about the possibility of an actual Aurora Pride event, I met Jerry Cunningham.

At the time, Jerry ran one of the country’s oldest gay-oriented publications, Out Front Magazine in Denver.

The name, he said, tells the story. Born in the 1960s, it launched the war for equality by pushing the idea of gay pride into America, instead of begging for mercy with a gay apology. The magazine has long been associated with the endless march for equality and exploration of what gay culture was and would become.

After decades of work, the bulk of America finally began to move past treating LGBTQ people as a disability or an off-color joke. America fumbled with the idea of acceptance.

Not everywhere, of course. Each year, state lawmakers still deal with absurd proposals and problems, such as having to outlaw quackery like anti-gay “conversion therapy.”

Just a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court OK’d gay hate disguised as free-speech, allowing homophobes to act on their disdain by insisting that their religion tells them two guys kissing is yucky, and that the artistry involved in throwing together a Wix wedding website makes it all a wretched free-speech conundrum.

As a nation, we’re not there yet. But in Aurora, as a community, we’re closer to where we should be because of people like Cunningham, and Zander Oklar, the current guru producing the big Pride show at the Aurora Reservoir park this weekend.

It’s a fun, family oriented event, free with a ticket. You can get yours at AuroraPride.com. 

Six years ago, when we were all wide-eyed and blinking at the reality that Aurora was going to hold its very own Pride event, Cunningham said the meaning was especially profound for him because Out Front was no longer the voice of an underground society simply seeking the right to exist and make a claim to human rights. It’s now, truly, out front, where it belongs.

He’s moved on from being publisher of the still-thriving magazine. He wrangled the regional gay rodeo event just a few weeks ago at the Arapahoe County Fairgrounds.

Six years later, Aurora Pride has truly evolved. It isn’t about acceptance, it’s about inclusion.

Our LGBTQ community doesn’t have to be anything other than moms, dads, doctors, skiers, pilots, writers, business owners, daughters, students and shoppers.

I would have loved to see Mike loving all this, but I’ll just have to love it for him.

Follow @EditorDavePerry on Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com