Capitol Pride – sponsored by Bud Light, Mayor Fenty, 32 candidates for positions I didn’t know existed, Haagen Dazs that no one will eat, and a poster featuring Hillary Clinton’s face. Where did my community go?

Trish, who is a stunning new addition to my life, agreed. From South Carolina, she is much more accustomed to the grass roots type of gay community that I grew up with in Salt Lake City. Instead, yesterday’s parade was a series of moving billboards. It is bewildering to look around and see an endless sea of people who have somehow been collectively relegated to marketing targets. It is troubling because this is exactly what we wanted.

I remember my first Pride. I was scared to have my photo taken by the newspaper, uncertain how my parent’s would react if the Jone’s next store became aware of my “phase.” But we weren’t there to hide, and cameras or not, personal ethics were involved. Salt Lake’s Pride is started with the traditional Dykes on Bikes, but it is quickly followed with a Pride flag that stretches for at least a city block. Pride officianados know that it is customary to throw money into the flag as it passes, honoring the drag queens who first threw coins at police men and ignited our fight for equal rights. Salt Lake’s version was created by a local family who lost their son, and touched by the story I volunteered to help carry the flag. It wasn’t act of pride that first year, but rather hope for self-acceptance.

Over the years, my love for Salt Lake’s Pride grew. I would go to march and support my friends, thrilled as those who had made such an impact on my life all gathered to cheer each other on in a culture that wished we would disappear. But with the oppression gone, has my community left with it? Perhaps I still don’t understand D.C., or I don’t quite grasp how to create family in such a large and now seemingly arbitrary LGBTQ(l, m, n, o, p) designation. It might just be a by-product of D.C.’s famously transient nature.

Parades are fun, but is the fight over? Did we win? What were we fighting for? The struggles of my childhood have evaporated with the years, and this generation seems to enjoy a normalization guaranteed by the Will & Grace effect. The fight for marriage falls flat as we question the sanity of marriage in the first place, AIDS has been demoted to history, and I can’t help but feel we are all on the edge of an existential crisis.

Perhaps Salt Lake was just a set of training wheels: “I march, therefore I am.” This is pretty much how the equation worked. Without the training wheels, perhaps now the hard work can begin.