When DEI Hits Small Town America - The Outrageous Gay Extravaganza In Brodie's Corners

'What we goin' do now, bro'?, Pharaoh Jones asked Davon Washington about the future of their front-and-center, poster boy, sit-in-the-front-of-the-bank jobs now in double jeopardy after the Supreme Court ruling dismantling affirmative action and race preference; and the election of Donald Trump. 'He don't like no black folk', said Pharoah, noticing the lily white Cabinet only tinged with color if you count Indians, 'and we be lookin' for work'. 

 

For the last four years both Davon and Pharoah had cushy sinecures at the United Federal Bank where they had been hired to diversify the bank's all-white staff. Management really needed no more hires, but it was considered good politics to add a few blacks to a decidedly un-black place; and so it was that both men were given big desks, secretaries, and a view out the plate glass front window where more importantly passersby could see them. 

This of course was not the case everywhere - big city visible black men were lawyers, political aides, and investors, but here in this modest-sized Midwest town where diversity was not the going thing, nor ever had been, businesses and government needed to show the DEI flag.  Brodie's Corners, thanks to its corn-fed conservatism, old line Scandinavian, Methodist stock, and age-old Republicanism, was a throwback to the earliest days of civil rights when big cities were displaying black people window dressing, expressing a solidarity with Martin Luther King and The Movement. Bank managers were no more integrationist than Bull Connor, but business was business, and what were a few bucks for a sinecure? 

So the Brodie's Corners' town council, finally realizing that the modern world had come, went to the local library, searched its microfilmed archives for relevant initiatives, and since it really was a throwback to the Sixties in terms of demography, ideas, faith, and principle, the window dressing approach seemed appropriate; and so it was that Pharoah and Davon were kept in silk suits for four years. 

The town got used to the two men, and nodded politely and smiled broadly to them as they passed the wide, tall windows facing Main Street.  If this was diversity, the townsfolks could easily accommodate it. Kept in check, diversity need not become ghetto, bling, ho's, pimps, and crack; and the aldermen were riding close herd on the situation.  

'Not here, never', said the Mayor in an unfortunate, unintended reference to George Wallace's 'Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever' speech at the doorway of the University of Alabama, but he meant what he said in any case, and those three words kept him in office for successive terms. 

 

All went along swimmingly in Brodie's Corners until the gay parade of 2024 when a phalanx of 'outside instigators' (another unwitting reference to Mississippi's view of the Freedom Riders) came down Main Street as naked as jaybirds, all painted up, star- and sequined-studded, flaming red hair and high heels, marching to The Sound of Music and blowing kisses to the crowd.

The parade was gay guerilla warfare since the organizers had been refused an official permit but decided to march anyway, and quite successful as the whole town turned out for a spectacle they could only imagine.  Only one resident had seen anything like it, the Bay-to-Breakers parade in San Francisco, a bacchanal of gay partying on a train of floats coursing through town from the Bay to the Pacific. 'Never saw anything like it', said Orville Hutchens, 'and never hoped to again, and here it is in our little town.  What is the world coming to?'. 

 

The whole idea of the Brodie's Corners parade was the work of a man who actually had been a member of the organizing committee for Bay-to-Breakers in San Francisco, and having been invited by the Biden White House to spread the good news to small towns in the Midwest, he gathered a group of friends and gay partisans to take on the pig farmers west of the Ohio. 

The staging area had been well-secured and camouflaged.  It was the broad open field just outside city limits where the Jesus Brotherhood Of America held their yearly revivals and where the Barnum & Bailey Circus put up a big top every five years. Vacant now in the interim, no one paid attention to the fixin's and goings-on of Bay-to-Breakers Redux until it was too late, when mid-morning on a brilliant Fall day, the first rank of baton-twirling marchers made their way towards the center of the town. By the time they had gotten to Elm Street the Mayor had been notified and called up the police, fire department, and sanitation workers to block the way. 

 

By this time, however, the streets were lined with jeering, egg-throwing matrons and overalled men pulled away from milking and threshing to witness the town's Day of Infamy; and there was nothing the Mayor could do but let the parade run its course. Democracy was in action, although perhaps not as the Founding Fathers might have envisioned it, and soon the forces of righteousness would prevail and these interlopers (here the Mayor used a string of obscene sexual slurs) would be quickly gone and forgotten. 

 

What the Mayor did not realize, since he was not as familiar with the town's historical archives as he should have been, the Biden White House had sent an FBI detail along with the gay men to serve federal warrants to anyone breaking the law, written and revised to protect and defend homosexuals - an intervention no different than the Kennedy days with Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach confronting George Wallace with a cease and desist order. 

And so it was that the Biden legal and federal law enforcement team who had overheard the Mayor's racist screed, politely warned him to keep his own counsel, withdraw his troops, and let the parade go on as planned. 

And so it did, winding up and own big streets and small, stopping for a fanfare in front of Harper Elementary, the Town Hall, and the First Methodist Church of Christ which boasted the biggest congregation in Brodie's Corners and the most conservative, and then back, exhausted to the fairgrounds to relax, unwind, and prepare for their next dance. 

The New York Times, alerted to the event by an organizer, had sent a reporter to cover the parade, and the next day's above-the-fold headline was Jeering Crowds Say No Way To Gay Pride, an article which took this 'conservative bastion...this social throwback...this racist backwater...' to task.  The waning days of the Biden Administration were not lame-duck nothings, but bold, impressive statements of commitment to the progressive cause, now in such danger from the MAGA forces of the Far Right. 

No one in Brodie's corners subscribed to the Times, so word about the article was heard only second hand, but by that time the fol-de-rol had died down and was only a fond memory. However The Day We Stood Against ______ (here the weekly newspaper spewed its own politically incorrect, bilious take on the parade) was read by each and every resident of the town, cut out, framed, and hung on rec-room walls. 

In any case, the Trump team was about to occupy Washington and gay parades were to be forever more consigned to the back pages of American history just like hippies, love-ins, communes, and tie-dyes. It was back to making babies, going to church, and making America great again, none of this f-------stuff; and so it was that like everything else once noteworthy in America, the infamous Brodie's Corners gay parade was never given a second thought.