Last Saturday, you might have noticed my absence from KTK—the BF and I went on our annual Houston Pride outing.
It was hot as hell outside, and we only lasted for a couple of hours. We never make it to the parade (I only went to the parade one year, which was enough for me), but we love walking around the festival every year. It’s usually the same stuff, more or less, but the energy and atmosphere of Pride is something I look forward to all year. As a gay couple, there are precious few spaces in which we can be our authentic selves. We’ve made great strides as a society in the last several years, but it is still a risk to do something as simple as hold hands in public—especially in the Trump era, when the hate is amplified and legitimized. Pride is one time when we get to feel “normal,” in a sense. If you’ve never been to a Pride celebration, I can’t adequately explain how energizing it is to be in a space where there is no judgment or hate (protesters across the street aside), but rather love and acceptance everywhere you look.
As usual, we had a wonderful time. I thought I would use this diary to share some of the photos we took while we were at Pride.
I’ll start with the food—honestly, the food trucks were the first place we ran to when we got inside the festival. There are usually some interesting food trucks, and this year did not disappoint. The first thing I had was a pizza cone. Yes, you read that correctly...a pizza cone. It’s a thing.
If you think that’s ridiculous, wait until you see the waffle dog.
We got there pretty early, but it was a good crowd. By the time we left a few hours later, it was starting to get a little too packed. Here are some of the people:
I’ll end with the haters. I don’t want to give them too much attention, but it’s always nice to see how incredibly outnumbered they are. Most of the people you see in the pic are Pride attendees surrounding the (literally) few protesters.
And now, for something completely different: After Pride, we went out for dinner with the BF’s Houston family to celebrate a cousin’s birthday. His aunt and uncle took us all out to a fancy dim sum restaurant, where no expense was spared. It’s the kind of place we’d only go if somebody else was footing the bill (which they were, thankfully). This was actually my first time doing dim sum at all, and now I think I’m way too spoiled to do it anywhere else. The food was amazing, and we ate until we could barely move. It seems that the restaurant took some traditional dim sum dishes and elevated them—the presentation, from beginning to end, was beautiful. Which means, of course, that there is plenty of food porn.
I’ll be honest—it took me a long time to figure out what these dishes were. I think they’re all captioned correctly.
Believe it or not, those aren’t even all of the dishes we ate—those are just the dishes that made it on camera. Yeah, we kind of went overboard.
As impressed as we were with the main dishes, the desserts just blew us away.
Okay, I think that’s enough pics for one evening. What do you want to kibitz about tonight?