Today's Google doodle celebrates the beginning of "Pride Month" with a spinning disco ball:
I got to wondering, just when did this Pride Month business start, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. To my surprise, I find that Bill Clinton first recognized Pride Month in 1999. I must have missed the memo.
I've never changed my belief that gays and lesbians make up about 3 percent of the population; that's 3 out of 100. You can look at the whole field of statistics on this subject and debate it all you want to, but I'm not going to go there. So by very simple arithmetic, that tells me there are about 10 million gays and lesbians in the United States, the population of which is 342,543,550 as I type this sentence.
(See the U. S. Census Bureau's Population Clock for up-to-the-second figures on the U. S. and world population. See Statistics Canada for Canadian figures.)
Here's a cheat sheet for you: roughly speaking, the U.S. population is about 8 times bigger than Canada's, and about 3 times bigger than Mexico's or Russia's. However, both India and China have about 4 times more people than the United States.
Well, anyway, is Pride Month really necessary? It matters not to me, because I'm an old man who doesn't get out of the house much anymore. Neither M.P. nor I have ever been to a Pride parade. We did go to a Pride celebration at the county fairgrounds on a June night in 2019 - we got there about 9 p.m., when it was all winding down. We listended to a few speakers and singers, and bought some trinkets to take home: a friendly, pleasant, down-home thing. (There were even some straight couples there, pushing babies in strollers - why, I have no idea.) The next year, it was cancelled on account of the pandemic, and we've never heard any more about it in this vicinity.
But I guess there has to be a Pride Month, because you just know that 10 million screaming queens could never agree on a single week, let alone a single day!
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