(Image via Facebook)

ABOVE: Jacob Whitesides is celebrating show week with a show-and-tell photo.

BELOW: Keep reading for why you can't pray away the gay, an attempt to pray away Caitlyn Jenner, a vicious gay attack and more ...

(Image via Matthew Rettenmund)

Celebrating improvements and progressions over time and embracing love no matter what your color, creed, or sexual preference is a good excuse for a mini party. You can, of course, throw an all-out party but you don’t have to; you can have just a few friends round and create a stylish mini party for those select few.

My shot of Randy from 2019, when he was celebrating Gertrude Stein's birth anniversary (Image by Matthew Rettenmund)

Randy Wicker is an LGBTQ activist who has been at it longer than almost anyone else in the world — at age 83, he has been fighting the gay fight for 63 years and counting.

If you Google him, you will find references to him that verify who he is and what he has done, which is not true of some others over the years who have claimed to have been things they were not. He was the first publicist for any LGBTQ movement, he worked in the South to bring reform and gay rights, he launched the Homosexual League of New York after having been an early Mattachine Society member, he was on radio and TV as an out gay man in the 1960s and to top it off, he was a roommate of Marsha P. Johnson's.

Today, Randy posted a long message on Facebook reflecting on his experiences with gay Pride parades over the years, and I think his words are important. They also reveal that being older is no excuse for being closed to change.

He writes:

ABOVE: Help Dave raise some cash for a great cause.

BELOW: Keep reading for a gay paper's struggle to right itself post-pandemic, more Madonna Pride reviews, Thomas Doherty's thigh on parade and more ..

(Images courtesy of Diane Bondareff/AP Images for Tishman Speyer)

NYC is coming alive with Pride, including all over Rockefeller Center! More:

Adi has the only video you really need of Madonna's surprise-ish performance at the Standard Thursday night to kick off Pride — looking fantastic, moving well (dancing on a bar, vogueing with patrons, tits visible in a see-through get-up), it was a reinforcement of the Madonna brand and undeniably queer/punk-rock.

The frivolity raised over $100K for three queer-youth charities, with more to come via that auction I reported on yesterday.

I was sick and couldn't go. NO, wait, typo — I was sick I couldn't go.

The driver, who was apprehended (Image via video still)

The news out of Wilton Manors, Florida, is tragic — and confusing.

A man, later IDed as a member of a gay chorus who was wearing a Pride-themed shirt and had a Pride flag on his vehicle, was at the wheel when his white pickup truck accelerated through part of a crowd at the beginning of the city's Pride parade.

Two people were struck. One died, and one is hospitalized.

It is never a good idea to decide we know what happened without any investigation, but in this case, it is perhaps excusable that many would immediately assume this was intentional — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis literally just signed a bill saying it's okay to mow down protesters with your vehicle. (Not being sarcastic — that happened.)

However, even though the mayor instantly declared it was “a terrorist attack,” “deliberate” and “premeditated,” it is looking like it was not.