Pittsburgh celebrates Pride Week

Dylan Drobish carried Pitt’s Rainbow Alliance banner down the Boulevard of the Allies… Dylan Drobish carried Pitt’s Rainbow Alliance banner down the Boulevard of the Allies during Sunday’s Pride Awareness March. He marched shirtless with an aqua-colored sticker that read “Queer” covering his right nipple and a pale yellow question mark sticker covering his left.

Three years ago, Drobish came to Pittsburgh’s PrideFest for the first time as a heterosexual ally — and as a woman.

Now, as Rainbow Alliance’s vice president and an outspoken transsexual, Drobish embodies the theme of this year’s Pride Week: “You belong.”

“Every year it has gotten easier to be out,” Drobish said.

Attending Pittsburgh’s pride festival and being at Pitt played a part in getting Drobish to this point, he said. He joined about 20 current and former Rainbow Alliance members who marched in the city’s largest pride festival.Pitt students and alumni also lined the streets for PrideFest, the festival that followed the parade, to show their support for gay rights.

Drobish and other members of Rainbow Alliance beckoned their friends to join the parade as they marched down the Boulevard of the Allies, Wood Street, Fifth Avenue and onto Sixth Street before the parade ended on Liberty Avenue.

PrideFest is the only celebration that shuts down Liberty Avenue from 10th Street to Sixth Street, and this year the festival closed down an extra block to accommodate more vendors.

“Pitt is always here in one way or another,” Pitt alumnus John Musser said.

During his time at Pitt, Musser gained campus celebrity status through his drag queen persona Veronica Bleaus. Musser played a central role in the annual Rainbow Alliance drag show, even after graduating in 2008. After dressing up like a foxy, blond nurse and a frustrated Ariel from The Little Mermaid, Bleaus took her final bow on Pitt’s stage this year.

Musser plays another role now. At PrideFest, he manned a booth laden with condoms, lubrication and pamphlets for the AIDS Task Force. After about two years volunteering with the AIDS awareness organization, he earned a job with the organization last March. He works to help eliminate the stigma of AIDS so that people will get tested and talk about it.

“Of the 56,000 new HIV infections that happen each year, half are men who have sex with men,” Musser said. “There’s a lot to be done here.”

Pitt representatives occupied a similar booth at the festival. The booth, sponsored by the Pitt Men’s Study for the Graduate School of Public Health, offered free condoms, pamphlets and foam stress relievers shaped like butts.

The stress relievers beckoned, “Don’t be an ass — get tested for HIV.” Research assistant Nathaniel Soltesz said the organization offers free HIV testing.

“We’re recruiting for some guys to participate [in our study] but mainly to be part of the community,” Soltesz said.

Christine Bryan, a spokeswoman for the Delta Foundation, which advocates for GLBT rights, said Pride Week’s theme is more positive than last year’s theme, “Your rights, Our Rights, Human Rights.”

She said this year’s theme has led to conversation about repealing the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and consideration to amend the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act, to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity or expression” in protecting people against discrimination in employment and housing.

A possible repeal of the 1993 “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, which bars openly gay people from serving in the military, passed the House and the Senate Armed Services Committee at the end of May.

A few protesters gathered on Grant Street near the start of the parade and preached that homosexuality is sinful.

Rainbow Alliance President James Weaver said he prefers not to pay attention to people who protest homosexuality.

“It’s irritating because I’m a Christian,” Weaver said. “The people who are at the parade are already comfortable with who they are. You’re not going to change their minds.”

The parade included floats, beauty pageant winners, a drag queen camouflaged as roses climbing a white fence and many shirtless men, like Drobish.

“When you go to a sporting event, people go without shirts and wear paint to show pride in their team,” Drobish said. “It’s like that pride in your team, but it’s pride in who you are.”