Heady days. Change ahead?

Is Irish Queers' long, cold winter about to warm up?

PSNI have just been disinvited from marching in the St. Patrick's Day parade by community outcry.

Heineken just pulled their sponsorship because of the parade's homophobia.

Sam Adams Brewery have similarly pulled their sponsorship from the Boston parade.

St. Patrick's Day parades are going off all over the world and making a big deal of their inclusiveness, their refusal of homophobia. As if to say Hellooooo New York?

The Taoiseach is in New York City and is getting no peace, as the calls for him to stand up for Irish LGBTQ people keep coming.

About a dozen LGBTQ and police accountability groups are set for the press conference and protest at the parade -- a show of solidarity and united purpose that we haven't seen in a good few years, because people get cyclically sick and tired of banging their heads against the unflinchingly bigoted parade committee.

No one who reads a newspaper in New York or Ireland could mistake the parade for an Irish celebration, in spite of some of the homophobes' efforts to recast their religious bigotry as "just not being all about gayness."

The calls for change are getting louder, and the evasions getting more and more pretzel-like. Could it be that the facades are falling altogether? That would be... such a relief.