This year, as you revel and remonstrate and represent in the 2012 Seattle Pride Parade, we here at SAGA(BATSAMOTT) would like to remind you to look to your left, then to your right. Look behind you, ahead of you, across the street. Look at the quietly loquacious people lounging in the corporate coffee shop kitty-corner to where you are. Look above you, in the gutter below you, and stand on your tiptoes to peer over the shoulder of the very tall man in front of you to see all the people in front of him. All around, you'll see it—community, and the beautiful and nonbeautiful people who make it theirs or choose to not make it theirs, as the case may be.

Some will be immediately recognizable; others may catch you by surprise. Still others seem to resemble someone you used to know, and it is those people who will get that Gotye song stuck in your head, swirling and buzzing, redolent with sharply strong melancholy. But there you stand, cheek to jowl, standing apart, yet cohesive among them, your collective individualism on parade even as you stand in place—the supple skin of wise-hearted youth at the mottled elbow of still-youthful senior citizens, the believers alongside the Beliebers, the excited beside those with crippling indigestion.

All around you, the intricate jigsaw of Pride will unfold to you—Latino and Asian and Blasian and Blatino and Aboriginals and Southpaws and Atheists, families in all their inclusiveness and exclusivity, born-and-bred Seattleites and annoying transplants from Michigan who drink too much and don't really "get" this whole Seattle thing, the transgender and the transgender-identifying quirkyalones, the athlete, the aesthetician, the impaired and their companion animals and the able-bodied and their uncompanionable animals, the strange and The Stranger. The Many Faces of Pride.

Speaking of one of those many things that I just mentioned in particular, we at SAGA(BATSAMOTT) urge you to pore over the Pride issue of The Stranger because it examines the multifaceted singularity of a particular facet of the multifacetedness of life, which is to say that it is about "traditional" marriage in all its blessed untraditionalness. An army of brave pioneers of the written word and the spoken word in its transcribed form—KELLEEN BLANCHARD, PAUL CONSTANT, SARAH GALVIN, SOLOMON GEORGIO, DOMINIC HOLDEN, MADELINE MACOMBER, CHARLES MUDEDE, ELI SANDERS, DAN SAVAGE, DAVID SCHMADER, CATHERINE R. SMYKA, PATRICK TESH, and ERICA THOMPSON—write about marriages. Traditional marriage, gay marriage, transgender marriage, arranged marriage, open marriage, sexless marriage, sexful marriage—all of these bonds of lustful lustlessness and personal impersonality fuse together into an inky, pixelated Pride Parade of individual togetherness.

Together, these individual pieces sing a Song of Myself to all of us, colluding into a rainbow of justice and tolerance and intolerance and injustice. This is us. This is me. This is not me. This is not you.

This is (am?) the Many Faces of Pride.