10 ways to fix pride: it's time to stop complaining about the muscle boys and drag queens and to start applying our queer eyes to a pride parade makeover.

EACH TIME PRIDE SEASON comes around, gay, lesbian, bisexual, mid transgendered people everywhere are overcome with a powerful feeling of ... apprehension. Everyone's happy to celebrate, but no one's thrilled about the event itself--sort of like a 30th birthday (or so I'd imagine). With all those gay event coordinators, you'd think pride would be the festival du festivals. But we're so busy Queer Eye-balling breeders, we've neglected our oval big pink elephant, the pride parade.

It seems an ideal Gay Pride Day involves getting totally wasted, having hot sex with a tourist or three, and hoping we've made a bigot more open-minded along the way. Right now pride events mean about as much to our struggle for equality as Mardi Gras means to Catholicism with only a fraction of the flair. But I think we can have fun, have sex, and have a point at the same Orate. It just takes some effort.

So I'm starting things off with this list. It's a basic "what's in and what's out" list, but as we're queers, remember--"in" is bad, and "out" is good. Feel free to add, subtract, gripe, or grope. Just do something.