When I was a kid, we were sometimes given to calling it "the Macy's Day Parade," so it would be disingenuous of me to complain about the crass commercialization of the quintessential American holiday. Still, this year, the “Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade” seemed even more an enormous billboard than in years past--Macy's, of course, NBC, Planter's Peanuts, Delta, Hello Kitty. I watched the parade this year with my birds, thankful for a lazy day at the conclusion of a crazy fall.
Admittedly, I got up late, so the beginning of the broadcast was early for me, even here on the east coast. I hadn't yet had my tea, and I might have, had I not known something about this year's Tony Award-winning musical "Kinky Boots," thought I was hallucinating when I saw, in the opening moments of the show, a transvestite featured, as a transvestite, on "America's parade." That’s right, folks, a drag queen, a species I didn’t discover until I was in my twenties, a symbol of the demi-monde, there in the bright light of day on 34th Street, leading the parade that would bring in Santa Claus and inaugurate the Christmas season for hundreds of thousands on national broadcast television. The unambiguous ambiguity was as shocking as the first time I heard, back in the 1980s, David Sedaris's "The Santaland Diaries" on NPR's "Morning Edition. The shocking segment, shocking on public radio in the 1980s, was the segment in which Crumpet and several Santas are trying to pick up a flirtatious elf, Snowball, in the men's locker room. Long after I gave up Santa, I was still not prepared to hear about him picking up twinks in a locker room.
The surprises in this year's Macy's parade didn't stop with "Kinky Boots" (though nothing else so overt). The rainbow unfurled in the 75th-anniversary tribute to the movie "The Wizard of Oz" looked suspiciously like the gay pride flag. The political right has long warned that homosexuals, if not watched closely, will infiltrate and subvert American culture. Given the long-standing significance of "The Wizard of Oz" in gay culture ("friend of Dorothy"; "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore"), it seems the conspiracy may have begun too long ago to turn back now.
Amid all of the reliably perennial features in the parade--the marching bands, the featuring of current Broadway musicals, Snoopy, the Macy's elves, and, of course, "It ends as it always ends," the entrance of Santa Claus--all signals of stability, continuity, predictability--there were other little touches that were symptoms of America's shift from G to PG 13. As the television cameras, almost unavoidably, panned east on 34th Street toward Broadway, there on the corner of the building across the street was a huge billboard, clearly legible on my TV screen, a buxom model in a red bra advertising a Victoria's Secret show. "But wait, there's more." The Victoria's Secret show is airing on CBS. The Macy's Parade, for those of you not attentive to such details, was airing on NBC. Now, there's genuine subversion.
