Christmas comes but once a year. So I’m blogging Pride while I can.

People like to say it’s just a myth that Judy Garland’s funeral contributed to the Stonewall riots which kicked off the modern gay liberation movement. Maybe. But if you had raided my hangout while I was trying to drown Dorothy’s death with a good bourbon and a better man you can bet a brick would’ve been in your face faster than you can say, "There’s no place like home."

Here’s Judy in her later years, taking a mediocre song from a shitty musical and making it sound like the National Anthem, looking at once wounded and casually assured—an eyebrow raise here, a head tilt there—until, her body rattling with the force of her feeling, she slams her hands down on top of the trunk. You want an example of strength in the face of adversity? Check your history: Even an out-of-control orchestra and some loony "heavenly" choir can’t beat Judy down. "As long as life is long/I’ll love him right or wrong/And somehow I’ll be strong/As long as he needs me"? No wonder the boys clung to her every note:

And then there’s Tom Higgins, in my personal favorite bit of gay activism, clocking that cuckoo homophobe Anita Bryant with a pie on October 14, 1977. He smeared the queer-hater. It was the pie heard round the world: Bryant’s political power soon got smashed right along with the banana cream. Ahhhhhhhhhh: