pride of the panhandle

I’ve criticized Mayor McCartt in the past for a certain . . . lack of courage in standing up for people who stepped out, so to speak, for her.

So I was gratified and pleased when I attended a yoga class with my fiancée and another friend. A flyer on the door of the downtown building advertised Pridefest 2006, the annual gay celebration and awareness festival. And on June 24, in Thompson Park, after local band Kickin’ Wookies and Austinite Ginger Leigh perform live, Mayor McCartt will speak.

That’s freaking fantastic, and the political courage that it takes in West Texas should be acknowledged. It is mind-numbingly impossible to imagine any previous mayor of this town speaking at Pridefest. They were too busy attempting to intimidate—just as an example—local writers in their Gaston-from-Beauty-and-the-Beast-furnished RV-dealership offices. Midway through their bile-spewed harangues, these mayors would leap onto their oak desk and belt out, “I use antlers in all of my deee-corating!”

But, I digress. And exaggerate. But not by much. The point is that previous mayors, manly as they might have been in their garish Recreational Vehicles and their “Utimate Hunt” jackets, weren’t so ready to speak during a week of events that also features a Gay Day Celebration at Splash, the Miss Gay America USA pageant, and screenings of such movies as Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Psycho Beach Party, as well as the far more obvious Academy-Award nominees.

Granted it’s not saying much, but Debra is, hands-down, the best Amarillo mayor in this blogger’s memory. The only campaign promise Mayor McCartt made that mattered was to invite all Amarilloans into the invitation-only secret society that this town’s political culture has been for so long. She shows up at Pridefest, and she shows up at the groundbreaking for fundie mega-church Trinity Fellowship’s new sanctuary, and she holds City Commission meetings all over town and at all hours of the day and night.

All that’s a start.

But y’all know damn well what the next step is. Single-member districts.

spacedark