UTOPIA on HUDSON STREET, NYC

It is June 28, 2009 and Hudson Street below me is packed with vendors marketing gay paraphernelia.  The air is thick with anticipation celebrating 40 years of Stonewall.  It is the biggest carnival day for this part of town, and this is a big anniversary.  The whole West Village is in hyper active mode the entire weekend every end of June for this utopian festival. The pulse of energy is infectious.  Sometimes, the utopia gets buried under the commercialism, the crowds, the anxiety and excessive production of identities.  It is a time of extraordinary costuming, magnificent adornment and cliches. The carnivalesque state of the inversion of power and the playfulness of sexual identities is momentarily relieving. The hyperbole of the weekend contrasts with the discretion of daily life in New York City. New Yorkers are less inclined to be limited by race, gender or sexuality as defining markers.  Self fashioning in the metropolis is more toned down in its daily identifications- more negotiated and cosmopolitan. People have to work across heterogeneities, differences, geographies, religious beliefs.  So the mass influx of more provincially attired social identities is both visually interesting, and somewhat predictable.  It foregrounds the play of urban and suburban styles of self production.  This is a big year: Gay Marriage is the big agenda this carnival season, and the determination to make the next big jump to normalize Gay Rights is tangible. It is shocking that New York State has not achieved this goal in the 21st century.  This undermines our claims to being the metropolitan center of the world, whose radical ideas of urban life and social living have impacted how other cities imagine their futures.  We cannot move forward without resolving this untenable contradiction: legalizing gay rights is a neccessary part of American's urban futures.