I don’t know that I’ve ever danced so much in my life, or spent a more exhaustingly wonderful weekend.
The past weekend were two of the biggest events of the Paris nonprofit schedule—Solidays, a three day festival for HIV/AIDS prevention, and le Marche de Fierté, the Paris Pride parade. Both these things were hugely impressive. Solidays was held in the Bois de Boulogne, on a huge fairground with four stages, a giant « village » of nonprofit associations, rides, and food—though of course, being France, the food offerings were less fried dough and more crêpes, kebabs, and gourmet hamburger for 10 euros a pop. There was du monde there, the French way to say zillions of people.
Friday was bitterly cold. I was working at the équipe-mobile, a new part of the CRIPS mission, which is basically a van that can take the same prevention techniques and tools out to the banlieus and places where it’s harder to find the same information. We at the festival huddled together swathed in red t-shirts/hoodies/letterman jackets, occasionally sallying forth to proffer condoms at passersby, or to try to entice them to play one of the jeux we had set up. This was moderately successful, but since it was chilly, everyone was already drunk, and Friday was the « quiet day » of the festival anyway, our pickings were relatively slim, and no one seemed particularly pleased to be there. I ended up going to the concert that night alone, something I normally wouldn’t have minded, but it turns out that being alone in a crowd of drunk couples who are just a little overexcited to see C2C can actually cause injury. (RIP my toe.) Nevertheless I got to see several of my favorite bands, heard some new music, and managed to make it home without erupting in scathing comments at the couples around me, which I consider a tremendous amount of self-restraint on my part.
Saturday I sleepily lugged myself over to the Tour de Montparnasse to help set up for the Marche de Fierté. This ended up being a lot of blowing up balloons. The theme of our float was «ça change quoi pour toi ? », translation being « What does this change for you ? » so we all nabbed pens and started writing. « I can have kids someday with my husband » someone wrote, and someone else « I can celebrate a 25th wedding anniversary with my love. » I wrote (in what I later horrifyingly realized was not grammatically correct), « My friends can have the same rights as I do. »
Somehow we managed to get approximately a hundred balloons out the door and down the street to where the bus was being set up. In front of us was a huge float for transvestite rights, most of whom were better coiffed/dressed/looking than I will ever be. I was assigned to the security cordon around the bus to make sure no one got run over, and I was a little nervous. I’d rather be in the bus, I thought, where I don’t have to just walk awkwardly holding this rope and trying to hand out stickers.
But then things got rolling and it was honestly the most joyous I have ever, ever seen Paris. The roads were thronged with people holding signs supporting us, supporting each other, supporting strangers. And once the music started, I could not stop dancing. I danced for three hours straight, I sang along, strangers came up to me and started dancing alongside me and we sang together and cheered for each other and for what the whole parade was about—accepting people, accepting that love is equal regardless of gender (or race), supporting people who deserve to be viewed equally under the law and in society. We had people follow us the entire way from Montparnasse to Bastille. It was infectious, it truly was, and I felt incredibly lucky to be there sharing my energy and my voice and my dancing shoes. Even the shy niece of our director who was there to support started dancing with me, and clad in feather boas and yellow sunglasses and giant smiles we sashayed and jumped and twirled our way through the grandest streets of the grandest city, and everything was wonderful, and I felt like I was part of something big and right.
That night I dragged my hurtin’ feet out to Solidays again with my girl Anna, where I got even further carried away by the music and danced even more. Sunday was even better, and lying in the warm sun that finally arrived, in the grass listening to Asif Avidan play in the background and French swirling above my head, I was the most content that I’ve been since I got to France. Paris can be a downer sometimes, but I also feel like I’ve been involved, with both Solidays and Pride, in something bigger , in something that matters and will continue to make a difference, and the fact that I can do that in another language still thrills me.
The things that I’ve done while in France are very different from what I’ve done in the US, in part because some of these things aren’t as accepted in the US. There would be an uproar if a public festival in the US gave out contraception at nearly every stand, or had people dancing around dressed as condoms, or even made sex a central part of the festival as Solidays did. Yet all the messages that the festival sent out, and indeed that the office I work in sends out, are all about living safely and positively—communication, protection, kindness. French people are shocked when I tell them that in many schools in the US it’s abstinence only education, even more shocked when I tell them that my own sex-ed came from videos from the 80s that only talked about puberty, and then in high school a week of talking in my history class about all the diseases that you could get. In the classes I’ve seen here, the animateurs talk about how to understand the other gender, how to be kind, how to be safe and how to know when you’re ready. To me, these would have been far more useful classes to take. Both Solidays and the Marche de Fierté allowed dialogue about the issues, instead of repressing them because they were uncomfortable. While this dialogue can get a little heated (the rally against gay marriage ended in tear gas and thrown bottles), at least it’s happening.
As a final, sobering note, however, the thing that actually struck me the most about Solidays was the shuttle ride there, which took about 15 minutes through the Bois du Boulogne, and where even during the daytime the prostitutes who work in the woods stood by the side of the road in children’s skirts and sky-high heels. The most poignant moment I remember is of seeing a woman in a long, bright red, beautiful dress sitting on a stool just outside of the woods, looking vacant and lost. I wonder if she bought that dress for herself. I wonder what she thought when she tried it on in the mirror. I wonder how many of the condoms that we filled people’s hands with at the festival made it out to this long stretch of girls, if any did at all.
Emily Wolfteich 