Oh yeah...Mardi Gras is about the height of debauchery. But most of the daytime stuff is pretty family friendly. I think like talloulou suggested...if they just kept the risque stuff to the night time and bars and still had family oriented events during the day, a whole lot would be done to bridge some divides there. But then I have to wonder if the media would only focus on the night time events just for ratings.
I agree with bringing out the bad stuff when the kids are in bed. Mardi Gras in New Orleans is a straight up boob fest for about two weeks, regardless of the time, the reason it gets that wild is there are just too many people to fit in jails. My city, Lafayette, is a little tamer, but you can still see just about any behavior you want if you know where to go.
And do you really think people are still so guarded with their sexuality that you would be friends with a gay person and not know it? I would find it very hard to be friends with someone and they not know because I am very unapologetic about my relationship with Josh. I'm not rudely overt about it but I don't hide it in any way. It concerns me that I would be so out of touch as to not realize some people do the whole pronoun switching thing or hide their partners around their friends.
I see where you are going with it, I was referring to the people who aren't out. I was discussing politics with a coworker and the Louisiana gay marriage vote came up, I mentioned I was in the 20% that voted yea on it and he was surprised because I am a conservative and the perception is we are all against it, then he mentioned the life before he came out, surprised the hell out of me because we would always talk about dating life and he was with women. In fact, I mentioned it to the boss about the discussion and was afraid I outed him because of her reaction, but she assured me he had told her prior, she was more proud that he was being honest with himself and everyone else, not hiding in shame, his issue, he was worried about harrassment and losing his job, go figure, these days people are still afraid of that.