A historical article I got in the mail: the origins of the Gay Pride Parades. Note: not written by me. :)
While several organizations were around before 1969, the start of the movement to secure Gay civil rights is usually associated with the Stonewall riots.
All you straight folks out there have no idea of gay history. I even had a protracted argument one day, with someone who was generally well educated and aware of political reality, that there were no gay bars before the 1980s. There were. They were underground, and even maintaining a low profile was no guarantee that police wouldn't show up.
The Stonewall Inn was a gay bar in The Village neighborhood of New York. Since gay bars had been basically illegal before 1966, it was not uncommon for gay bars to be mafia run. Stonewall was reputed to be mafia run.
Prior to 1966 it was illegal for a bartender to serve a drink to 3 or more homosexuals. So of course, this being the 60s, a "sip in" was staged. The NY liquor board later stated that the rules never had been what the rules actually were, so gay bars started to prolfierate after 66.
The police still took delight in harassing gays, lesbians and transgendered at every turn after 66. On June 27, 1969, a Friday night, they decided to raid the Stonewall Inn. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and the following Wednesday riots were the result of that raid.
[take a look at the desperate criminals arrested by police at a 1962 Halloween Party. New York must have been VERY safe in 1962, if this is how police were spending their time on Halloween.]
When police would raid a bar, they would arrest anyone "in clothes usually reserved for the other gender." Drag queens and lesbians in butch attire. Sometimes they would simply arrest everyone in the bar. Often they would publish the names of those arrested in the paper.
As they were forcing a lesbian into a squad car on that Friday night in June, she struggled. The crowd decided she had the right idea, and attacked. There were 400 "onlookers" and 8 police, so the police retreated and barricaded themselves in the bar. Since resisting was not to be condoned the cops grabbed the first person they could and dragged him into the bar and beat him. That person was heterosexual folk singer Dave van Ronk, who had come from a straight club down the block to see what the commotion was all about. (Van Ronk was later charged with assaulting police.) A parking meter was uprooted and turned into a battering ram. Someone tried to set fire to the bar with the police inside. Eventually more police arrived and dispersed the crowd. The two following nights, and the next Wednesday saw more of the same, and galvanized the Gay Community.
The first Gay Pride parade took place the following year, in commemoration of the riots.
Finally, at long last, we were done with tourism and at the first major pilgrimage destination on our journey. I had been wondering the whole trip: what will it be like? This is the site of a carefully investigated and approved apparition. People regularly come here to be healed, from all around the world, and apparently it works ‘cause people still keep coming.
It was pretty darn touristy (especially after seeing Laghet).
It wasn’t a disappointing visit, there were just more materialistic trappings than I had imagined. If you take three buildings at random from a street in Lourdes, I can guarantee that one is a gift shop and another is a hotel. I guess it makes sense, though; the easiest way to make a living in that town is to serve the 5 million pilgrims that come every year. Add to that the fact that 2008 marked the 150 year anniversary of the apparition, and you’ve got even more pilgrims flooding the streets.
When we got there, the streets were virtually empty, though.
It was pretty early in the morning, AND apparently March is part of the “off-season.” Half the hotels were closed and a lot of the shops were renovating, repainting, or just boarded up. Down by the shrine, the streets looked even more deserted. To accommodate all the visitors and processions they have over the summer, the sidewalks widen down by the shrine, until they’re twice as wide as the street. Then the cars stop, and it gets even bigger. There we were, walking across giant sidewalks, luggage in tow, with no one in sight and empty gift shops lining the street.
It was a pretty surreal experience.
One of the unique elements of Lourdes was that every gift shop is named after a saint… but for no apparent reason. The Joan of Arc store has all the same merchandise as the St. Bridget store, or the store of the Sacred Heart. My guess is they use the name to pull in pilgrims that like that particular saint, and make them buy souvenirs there instead of somewhere else.
We stayed in an “apartment hotel,” which was probably the nicest lodging we had the whole trip. The best part was: it had a kitchen! We resolved to make full use of it, which led to some other adventures (but I’ll talk about them in the next post). The plan was just to drop off our luggage and go adventuring. We decided to collapse for awhile first, though. The overnight train was more exhausting than I thought it would be.
Eventually, we did get out to the shrine, and ran into the same “empty” feeling there, too. This place was obviously built to hold a lot of people, and there were hardly any around. We explored the grounds around the shrine first, and found some ‘empty’ buildings: museums (one about the shroud of Turin, one about recent healings at the shrine, stuff like that), huge meeting halls, and a bunch of chapels. Most of the chapels were closed, and the ones that were open had the Blessed Sacrament removed, just because no one would be in there.
The first place that we found real activity was at the reconciliation building. It was three stories tall, and its sole function was to house confessionals. Probably 30 people could receive the sacrament at the same time, and it was still in use during the off-season. That struck me as amazing.
Tasha: As a contrast to this, my home church just built their first confessional. The church has been around for almost 30 years. Think about that for a bit.
Steve: As we got closer to the heart of the place, we saw more life. The church itself was huge. It had a colonnade around the courtyard, a lot like St. Peter’s (it even had statues of the saints around the top, although a lot fewer than there are at the basilica). On the ground level is a cathedral dedicated to the Rosary, and that was full of tourists. Around the inside are 15 arches, each with a domed ceiling piece and an altar; each one dedicated to a different decade of the Rosary. The wall above each altar is a particular scene from the life of Christ, surrounded by the Old Testament prophesies, symbolism, and foreshadowings that apply to it. Each one was a pile of theology, painted purely in pictures. The most interesting part was how recent it was. None of it was more than 150 years old. Huge contrast to Rome, where a church from the 13th century isn’t out of the ordinary. Most of the artwork here was finished around 1907.
Above the cathedral was the main basilica, but there was a crypt for perpetual adoration in between them. Now take a second to count: that’s three churches, stacked literally on top of each other. Then if you go around the churches, you see the mountain they are built into. In the side of that mountain is the grotto where the Blessed Mother actually appeared. That makes four churches, all in one spot, in an almost vertical line. That’s something you don’t see every day.
The crypt was beautiful. It was low, long and covered in gold. Right inside the door was a huge statue of St. Peter in a fancy chair. The toes on his leading foot were worn so far down that the brass was gone, and you could see layers of plaster underneath. So many pilgrims had gone past, and kissed his toes, or just reached up to touch them, it had worn straight through the metal.
To top off the tour, the highest basilica was much older. It was built to imitate the renaissance style, which is very restrained and austere. Compared to the churches below, it was very plain on the inside, but walking up to it, the buttresses and spires were really amazing. They were in the spirit of renovation too, and were actually replacing some of the huge stones in one of the towers with a huge crane. It had to be huge, to reach up that high.
This post has gotten pretty long, eh? I’ll cut it off here, and tell you more about our personal adventures in the next post.
In our original plan, we were going to make a day trip out to the shrine of LaSalette on our way through eastern France. It was one of the places in Europe (along with Fatima and Lourdes) where Mary had appeared to children and spoken with them. All of them were in the past 200 years, too, so it’s been heavily documented and investigated.
After mass in Nice, we flagged down the priest to see if he knew a good way to get out to the shrine. He didn’t know English, but he knew enough to introduce us to a young couple that did. They thought it was pretty cool that we turned our spring break into a pilgrimage, but told us that getting out to LaSalette before we left on Friday was impossible. If we had a car, it would be a 4-5 hour drive; by bus, it was 6-8. “But” they said, “if you want to visit a shrine to Our Lady, you should go out to Laghet. That’s where people in Nice go when they want to ask Mary to pray for them.” The wife scribbled some bus routes on the back of a receipt, and then they were gone.
Well, we had already explored a lot of Nice, and the beach was a little bit on the cold and windy side, so it was set as the official adventure for the following day.
The story is: the chapel of Laghet was built sometime between 1200 and 1500 AD in the mountains of southeast France. It was used mostly as a shelter by local shepherds until the early 1600s, when a nobleman from a nearby town visited the sanctuary. He was saddened by how much it had fallen into disrepair, and paid from his own money to have it restored. He also had a Parisian artist carve a statue of Mary to place in the church, and then (inexplicably) miracles started happening. When the local faithful started praying at the shrine, a boy was healed of leprosy, a prisoner of war was set free, a girl was cured of possession... From that point on, it became a place of pilgrimage and prayer for the local people. (This was as much detail as we could get translated on the story.)
It had such a completely local feel. Everyone there was French, spoke only French, and the flyers they gave out were in French, Italian or Spanish (so it seemed like pilgrims came from only as far as the bordering countries). It made a really interesting contrast to the other major global destinations we visited later (Lourdes and Fatima), but don’t let me get ahead of myself here.
To get out to the shrine, we hopped a bus that took us out of the city and wound its way up the mountainside. Nestled in the where the air was clear and sharp was a tiny church (the sanctuary was maybe 50 ft square) with a cloister (hallway) wrapped around it. Around the cloister were statues of heavy-duty prayer warrior saints: St. Anthony, Padre Pio, the Little Flower, St. Rita, the Cure of Ars… but the most amazing thing about the place was the paintings.
Every wall of the cloister was covered with rows and rows of paintings, some of them very rough, all of them very simple and humble. Apparently, the way that you pray at the shrine of Laghet is to bring a painting of the tragedy that occurred, and leave it there for the Blessed Mother. There were pictures of deathbeds, falls from buildings, wounded children, carriage accidents (the shrine has been around for quite some time), and there was even a painting from 1790 of a ship lost at sea. Everywhere you looked, there was a human tragedy with real people, faces you could recognize, and they had all been brought out to the mountains to entrust to Our Lady. Almost all of them had the Madonna of Laghet up in the corner praying, or watching, or receiving a dying child into her arms from heaven. It was really beautiful.
As if that wasn’t moving enough, there was a crypt below the church that they just opened in the past few decades. We went down to see what it held, and found the recent petitions. The walls had huge corkboards, where people had pinned up photos, poems, and prayers, there were candles burning in every corner, and one wall had a row of crutches that had been left behind by people who apparently didn’t need them anymore. I wanted so bad to leave a picture of Arif there, but there was no way to make that happen. We were able to spend a lot of time there praying, and attended mass before heading back to Nice.
The whole layover in Nice was a really refreshing breather. We never got out to LaSalette, instead we had it replaced by a place that was more ancient, more reverent, and really seemed more miraculous. One way or another, I was pretty thrilled with how well our trip was going, and we boarded our first overnight train to bring us to Lourdes.
We had set a pretty detailed plan before leaving, and it packed a lot into the first few days of our break.
Rome was a weeklong whirlwind already, and even though we had two days in Venice and two in Milan, it still felt like we were rushing (notice: a pun could be made here about being American, not Russian). As we were coming in to Nice, that feeling changed.
I had never heard of it, but apparently Nice is a pretty famous European beach town. It's right on the shores of the Mediterranean, and is full of tourists from around the EU, especially during the summer. That made finding lodging easy, because of just how many little hotels there were to support the summer crowds. Since we showed up in the off season, plenty of rooms were empty, and some places were willing to drop their prices in order to get our business.
We did a bit of looking, and found a couple really nice places that would give us a room for inside our budget. We ended up settling on the one that wasn’t across from a sex shop (there were actually a lot of these in France, I was highly disappointed). The guy at the desk was named ‘Bader’ (bah-der), and was super nice. We came in later on with chicken from the grocery store, and just so we didn’t have to eat it cold, he let use the staff microwave in the hotel employee’s break room to warm it up. Great hospitality.
Since we were stuck here for the next couple days, we rescheduled our hotel in Lourdes, and canceled the one in Barcelona. A lot like what I did as a producer for the school, I had prepared a logistics document for our trip with all the information we could possibly need, and it really paid off. It was a little sad that we wouldn’t be able to see Barcelona, but since we were in a French beach town instead of a Spanish beach town, it wasn’t too disappointing overall.
It was an interesting city. The center of town was very much designed for people to congregate, there were huge, stone-paved streets set aside purely for pedestrians, gardens, and in the town square, there was a set of 8 huge columns in the middle of the street, with sculptures of naked men in athletic poses, which lit up at night and changed colors. I don’t know what they represented, but they were kinda cool to look at. It was either really classy or just kinda funky. I never really decided which…
We walked around the city a lot. Walking to the beach, then to the grocery store, then back to the beach for a picnic… we also collected some ‘souvenir water.’
It’s somewhat of a peculiar habit, but a few years ago I started collecting water from far off, adventury places. We have some friends that live on an island off the coast of Alabama, and on one visit, we found an old bottle washed up on the beach with its cover completely intact. I used it to gather some ocean water from the Gulf of Mexico, and then put it on the shelf of my library when I got home. After that a friend brought me back some water from Hawaii, my sister got me some in Canada on her honeymoon, and the collection has continued to grow. I like having it because of how unique it is, easy to tell stories about, and you can also get it at a fairly low cost.
Of course, with all the fantastic places we were going on this trip, I HAD to get water from some key spots in Europe. The trick was getting it into containers that were small enough to be easily transportable, and wouldn’t make our luggage impossible to check at the airport. In Venice, we emptied a little bottle of mouthwash to get water from the canals, and I had also filled a water bottle at the Trevi Fountain in Rome. When we finished our picnic on the shores of the Mediterranean, we had an empty jelly jar. It was small, it was round enough to be quaint (kinda a pot-bellied little thing), so into the surf we go, and came out with the jar of water, and some pebbles and sea glass to sit in the bottom. Looking at these three containers of water, it was decided that the Trevi bottle was far too big. Luckily, a couple of the stores we had visited sold these teeny little wine bottles for really cheap, so the Trevi water was relocated to a much classier container.
We had also found a church in our explorations, so in the evening we wandered down that way and ended up at mass for the feast of St. Joseph.
I tell ya, French is such a cool language. They use a lot of sounds and mouth-shapes that Americans never even dream of! The prayers of the mass sounded so strange, I almost burst into a laugh at the beginning of mass. I definitely would like to learn French at some point, just so I can have an excuse to say words like that.
It's just one letter difference, couldn't cause too much trouble, right?
We woke up early to catch the commuter train out of Milan. The newly discovered limitations on our Eurail passes meant normally one free train in the morning, and one in the evening. Unfortunately, we took a little too long on breakfast, and made it to the station just barely under the wire for our 8:30 train to Genova.
When we ordered our Eurail passes, they sent us a timetable book, so we could plan our trip in advance. It was published at the beginning of the year, though, so we were warned that all the times might not be accurate.
When we got to the platform, it said 8:35 to Geneve. *Sigh of relief* we're not late, they just changed the train schedule. Spelling seemed to change quite a bit too: what we know as Florence is spelled 'Firenze' in Italian, and Venice turns into 'Venezia.' We were getting used to the fact that if our timetable book says one thing, the train station will probably say something different.
So out of Milan we go. Annie digs into second breakfast, and Tasha and I settle into our book. Enter the conductor. This is where we discovered that Geneva is different from Genova, no matter what language you're speaking.
Apparently, Genova is just a stop on a train going to another town (even though the timetable book said it terminated in Genova), so we completely missed the train we were supposed to get on. Instead, we were on a high speed (and high cost) train to Geneva, Switzerland.
The conductor was really nice about it, though. She let us off at the next stop (without having to pay for our mistake), and gave us the times and trains that we would need to get where we were going.
The stop in the north of Italy turned out really cool though, because while we were waiting for our train back to Milan, we hit a Basilica of the Assumption, which was really beautiful, and gave us a reminder that we had someone watching out for us.
Once we got back to Milan and took our seats on the right train, we lost our tickets.
Nothing huge. We had set them down on the seat, and the lady across from us picked them up, thinking they were hers. It ended up being a really good thing, though because as she gave them back, she asked if we had validated them (in Italian). It took us awhile to overcome language barriers, but found out that whenever you buy a ticket, you need to feed it into a machine at the beginning of the platform before the train leaves, or else you get a fine when they punch it on the train. I got a chance to run full-tilt down the length of the platform, in order to get them stamped, and we learned yet another valuable lesson about the Europe train system.
This post has been very much about our learning curve. You don't use trains like this very often in the US, and we discovered the system isn't quite self-explanatory. Now, don't tell any concerned mothers that may (or may not) be reading this, but the last part of our train learning curve caused a pretty radical change of plans for the next leg of our journey.
Free or not, there turned out to be only one train that went from our area to Lourdes. It left from Nice, France at 10 am on Thursday. The problem was, the earliest we could get there from Milan was 10:45. We had a reservation on Wednesday night in Avignon, but getting from there to Nice proved even more difficult (which was pretty weird, because of how much closer they are together).
To catch our train, we decided to cancel our hotel in Avignon (we wouldn't be able to use it anyway), and just stay the night in the Nice train station. Annie's comment on it was “What's a trip to Europe without spending a night in a station?” It couldn't be that bad, my sister stayed on a bench in a German station on her way back from World Youth Day in Cologne, and on his Europe trip, my older brother actually spent a couple nights in trees after getting locked out of his hostel. Besides, everything we saw said the town was really Nice.
So, apparently the Blessed Mother had different plans (does she count as a concerned mother?)
We got to Nice without any further complications. To avoid any more complications, we decided to buy our tickets to Lourdes right away (and validate them), so that we would be sure that all the connections would work. It was Wednesday afternoon, and the guy at the counter tells us that tomorrow there would be a nationwide strike by all train and bus workers, so we wouldn't be able to get out of Nice until Friday night.
With two and a half days to stay, we definitely needed lodging, so we struck out across the town to find a plan B.
, with someone who was generally well educated and aware of political reality, that there were no gay bars before the 1980s. There were. They were underground, and even maintaining a low profile was no guarantee that police wouldn't show up.
