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Angel fucking hated Pride Month.
It wasn’t that he hated the general concept. I mean, the Stonewall riots on Christopher Street had pretty much everything he liked, and he still pitied himself for having died 20 years too early to actually be there. The riots had it all - queer people, excessive violence towards misogynistic assholes, and looking stylish while fucking over the mafia. The perfect match, really. And he wouldn’t even have had to go anywhere. Straight in New York. Fucking Bonnie’s old joint of all places, even if, from what he’d gathered, the Genovese had bought it up a few years prior, turning it into a queer bar - probably just to fuck with him. The thing with the speakeasy in the 30s might have also played a role. Easier to run a queer speakeasy out of a joint that had once been a regular one he’d fathom. Anyways… that Tony fella really should have really kept Bonnie’s name on there after buying it up. Vincent Bonavia ad been around at the same time as him. Made-man with an absolutely stupid-ass nickname. That he religiously went by one might add. He thought back to that time he’d thought it’d be funny to ask the guy if Bonnie was his drag name - and he’d promptly regretted it. Good days. Every time he heard the word Stonewall, he couldn’t help but feel a bit bummed. It could have been the Bonnie riots. He could have been at the Bonnie riots. Seriously, c’mon! But yeah… Stonewall Inn. He must have been one of the very few to fully appreciate THAT irony.
Not that he’d ever get to tell the story to anyone but Cherri. That’s what he fucking hated. With the amount of time he spent in front of the camera semi-clothed during June, one would think he’d get to actually talk about shit every once in a while. But it “didn’t fit his image.”
Gotta fucking appreciate that 180°.
Fucking Pride.
Yeah, he’d never been able to hide that he was straight as a fucking circle. His attitude toward that had drastically fluctuated throughout the years. Overall though, it was the one thing that defined his whole life and afterlife. Because in the end, it was a fucking FACT that his life would have been a lot fucking easier if he hadn’t been fucking gay. He might not even have started with the damn drugs. Well, maybe he would have, who was he kidding. He definitely wouldn’t have been that shit outta luck in death though. He’d never had any reason to fucking be proud of the thing that had made his life go tits up once his family found out, and got him sucked into a drug-fueled spiral of sexual liberation post-mortem that had eventually ended him with the bane of his existence, Valentino. In life, he’d had to do everything he could to be the perfect mafia son, racking up his kill count to hide the fact he was a fucking fairy and a half, until it became too obvious regardless, and now, in death, he wasn’t even allowed to run a simple drug deal because there were always more dicks to suck and the word no meant nothing. He went from not being allowed to be gay to not being allowed to be anything BUT gay.
So fuck Pride. And the most infuriating thing ever, really, was that there really wasn’t a need for pride month in hell. Everyone could like what they fucking liked down here, and whoever didn’t like that could fuck straight off. The original spirit of the riots. All the power to Stormé, badass black lesbian drag king bitch she was, to get that shit rolling up top, but in hell, every day was a riot. One of the very few perks really… if someone calls you a stupid slur, you just shoot them until they stop being stupid. It wasn’t like there were any laws (except for fucking copyright of all things), so whoever had the most power could basically do whatever they wanted. And at the moment that was the VVVs. Hell was basically run by queers, with Vox and Val leading their respective empires, and not giving a fuck. So whenever some new idiot had the brilliant idea of boycotting queer businesses, they’d notice sooner rather than later that they were shit out of luck.
And still, they kept Pride Month around just to fuck with Angel. A whole month where he could look in the mirror and put rainbow glitter onto the lids of his heterochromatic eyes and remember that the black one was black because his father had beaten him to a pulp when he found out his boy was a sissy. And then he could run from party to party, putting on his fakest smile until eventually the annual invitation to that hypocritical spectacle Channel 666 always put on came around - the one where Katie Killjoy always “mysteriously got sick” the day before so she wouldn’t have to touch the gays. The one where he was expected to tell the world how Valentino helped him be “out and proud” back in the 70s, and how fucking great it was to have such a supportive boss who didn’t exploit him at all and only raped him occasionally (with that last bit being very fucking silent). The one where he could enjoy being the fucking poster boy for unapologetically being yourself, with all cameras on him, and a pair of glowing eyes watching very intently that he only gave them the prewritten lies. Knowing, that somewhere across the city his father was also watching - and hating him, just like he has for the last 80 years.
Happy Pride.