During the last weekend of June--as happens about this time every year--I was queer. For me, the weekend was spent with some 150,000 others at Seattle's version of an annual Freedom Day event, a parade --as opposed to a march--through the heart of Capitol Hill, Seattle's traditionally gay-friendly neighborhood.

It was the largest turnout in the history of the event in Seattle, and, as with many other cities, it was newly politicized this year. In many large cities, gay pride parades have lost steam in recent years. They've become corporatized--as advertisers discovered that we're a fabulous niche market that loves to shop --and depoliticized, as American cultural acceptance of variations in sexual orientation moved inexorably forward. Sure, there was bigotry and oppression --but far less than there was twenty or even ten years ago, especially in large coastal cities like the one I live in.

But then 2004 hit, and with it the awareness that we still have a long ways to go. The use of gay marriage as a wedge issue for conservatives, and the adoption of anti-gay amendments to the constitutions of states across America, has served as something of a wake-up call to the GLBT community. While we partied, they organized.

The mainstreaming of gay culture has meant it has become less political. Most of the rest of the time these days, I'm not queer--I'm me. As it happens, part of me is that I'm bisexual; my first kiss with a woman didn't come until I was 21, and as a young man the "differences" in, among other things, who I found attractive, were fairly central to my life and to my increasing political awareness. By 1987, with most of my peers from past years dead or dying, I was organizing to help get angry queers arrested at the Supreme Court during that year's enormous March on Washington.

But a funny thing happened. In my efforts to convince Middle America that who I loved didn't define me as a person, I also convinced myself. And once the overt discrimination stopped (at least in our urban ghettos) and our men stopped dying in large numbers, a lot of people reached the same conclusion. And so, in a Pride parade, if we raise our fists, it's likelier to be an obscene gesture than an invitation to revolution. Get that boring activist off the stage; I wanna hear Sister Sledge again.

It's a cultural truism, at least in this self-indulgent country, that more people will always want to party than to fight for social or political change. (c.f. the '60s.) In Seattle a few years ago, the organizing committee for the annual Pride march literally split in two over the question of corporatization and the desire of some organizers to turn the march into a mobile, queer-friendly infomercial. The line was beat back, a bit, but that's about as political a statement as a gay pride event is ever going to produce now in Seattle.

To really foment social and political change--or even to remember why we started marching in the first place--we all ought to get on a bus ourselves, and have 150,000 people march in Tacoma, or Yakima, or Boise, or... you get the idea. Apply it to your own neck of the woods. There's still plenty of homophobia out there. If it's comfortable where you are, move.

The capper, of course, is that this isn't just a queer phenomenon. Progressive politicos of all stripes routinely spend too much of our time talking with each other, instead of the rest of America--let alone the world--let alone listening and learning in such places as well.

There's something to be said--"safety" comes to mind, another queer concern--for sticking to our ghettos. But if we want genuine change, that's not where it's going to come. What's happened to the annual ritual invocation of Stonewall, and how it's gradually become both less relevant and less of an agent for change, is a measure of queer folks' success in achieving a measure of cultural acceptance. But it's also a lesson all progressive activists should heed--that if we want change, and it's comfortable where we are, it's time to go somewhere else.