Check out Curtis Jensen’s fantastic video of San Francisco’s drag queen Easter Bonnet contest. Curtis writes in the forums: “Yes Halloween is totally fucked up in San Francisco, but I’ll just bet you don’t have an Easter Celebration quite like this anywhere BUT San Francisco. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence do it up right in the name of that reanimated corpse of a savior.”

Easter has come and gone. One of the strangest holidays on the calendar, Easter can happen anytime in April or March. It’s very sneaky that way.

The reason Easter’s occurrence is different every year is so confusing has to do with a multitude of different factors. Everything from the patterns of the moon to the occurrence of Jewish Passover to the vernal equinox have their hand in why it plays peekaboo with the calendar.

Of course, Easter is associated with many different traditions. The most obvious is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, which in modern times is what Easter is really all about. So what do bunnies, bonnets and colorfully dyed eggs have to do with all of that religious symbolism?

Some might argue that the Easter Egg represents “new life,” as a chick would hatch from an egg. Another theory is that eggs were forbidden during the celebration of Lent, so on Easter eggs are once again allowed and therefore celebrated. The colorful eggs can possibly be traced to a tale where Mary Magdalene announced Jesus’s resurrection to the Emperor of Rome. The Emperor pointed to an egg on his table and said to Mary, “Christ has not risen no more than that egg is red.” Immediately after making this statement, the egg turned blood red.

Whatever the origins, the most frequently forgotten tradition is that of the Easter Parade. Popularized in the 1948 film starring Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, and by the song of the same title, Easter Parades featured extravagantly-coiffed bonnets and a parade to show them off along with the participants’ “Easter Best” clothes.

The GLBT community should embrace such fanciful traditions and make them into something even more fabulous, but it’s hard to find an Easter Parade in the LGBT communities other than in San Francisco, which puts on one hell of a show. Of course the activity of coloring eggs is always a treat but I propose from the bottom of my very gay heart that we bring back the Easter Bonnet and the Easter Parade and make it what Judy Garland intended- a fabulous showcase of spring extravaganza.

Check out this colorful story about the trials of war, told from the perspective of the everlasting and delicious Marshmallow Peep.