A week and a half ago I did a post on the Pride march held in Downtown Cleveland. Well, that's not the only LGBTQ event of note in the great state of Ohio. Case in point, a smaller but still jam-packed (up to 1600 people) Pride festival took place in Cleveland's far-flung southern suburb of Broadview Heights this past Saturday, one with a special guest star, three-term Senator and straight ally Sherrod Brown, who's up for a fourth term this November. Now I've said the place was packed with people, and the crowd surrounding Senator Brown was especially thick, but I still managed to shake his hand anyway. It occurred to me afterward that this was as close as I've gotten to a celebrity since 1982 when General Hospital's Jacklyn Zeman (who died last year) made a personal appearance at the now defunct Parmatown Mall. At the time mightily laboring under the queer-free delusion that I was nothing less than a normal red-blooded healthy American male, I told Ms. Zeman that I thought she was the prettiest girl on GH (sorry, Genie, but you weren't there), to which she smiled and replied, "My mother would agree with you." As erotically charged as that response may be, in the end it just wasn't enough to keep me out of the club with the shirtless bartender and poster of Rita Moreno as Googie Gomez in The Ritz. The road not taken. Or rather, the road taken. Whatever. Getting back to Senator Brown, I had hoped to spend 30 to 45 minutes discussing with him everything from the Gaza Strip to the border situation to my suggestion that FDR's Supreme Court-packing bill be reintroduced into Congress. Unfortunately, standing right behind him was a burly man in a dark suit and dark glasses who looked like he was getting ready to smash me with his right thumb, so I hastily skedaddled out of there but not without first assuring the senator that he had my vote this fall. A long-time Democratic Party mainstay of Ohio politics, Brown has a very good progressive record, but I probably would vote for him even if he didn't, as the present-day GOP is as evil as any soap opera villain faced by Luke and Laura. Stay tuned.
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