If you're the type to stay out too late, too often, as soon as the Chicago weather turns, maybe you will have experienced the one Sunday morning in the middle of summer when you're coming home on the el after doing something both painful and embarrassing – like waking up outside a bar on the far west side of the city – to find the train car packed with shirtless, beaded men with blue angel wings, preening like peacocks under rainbow flags.

It's the Pride Parade . It's not something for the faint of heart.

Ryan Fischer, a marketing assistant at Smith Bucklin, took part in the festivities for the first time last year.

“I got there at the end, and just hopped in the parade,” he said. “There were millions of floats – there were the attorneys that do the civil rights cases, there were the Jewel shopping carts, there were the drag queens.”

Although, initially, you may not think it so, at nine a.m. on a crowded, half-naked el car, the best thing about the Pride Parade is its lack of exclusivity . “It's like Halloween…with an agenda,” claimed one boa-clad observer at last year's festivities. While the focal point of the day is clearly to celebrate the rights of the long-oppressed sexual orientation, the parade is a fabulous excuse for anyone to put on a dress and shake it, or just to fill the streets with good old mid-day summer debauchery. There's a contingent of fraternity men, for example, that make their yearly march with shirts emblazoned with their organization's symbols: Phi Alpha Gamma. Here's a hint: It's not a real fraternity. Take the Greek letters as one three-letter word. Use the sound of “phi” and you get a British cigarette. Aha.

After viewing the parade's participants in various states of dress and, well, undress , it's hard to imagine flag-waving patriots holding their two-year-old daughters up above the crowd to get a better view, postured by the standard wide-angle camera pan down the sidewalk at Macy's . But they're there too. Rather than the main, ahem, drags of Chicago , the Pride Parade snakes through Boystown, taking over Halsted and Broadway.

“It was my first parade, so the point was to be proud of who I am,” Fischer said. “This year should be exciting, especially with the issue of marriage,” he continued, referring to the Massachusetts statute that recognized same-sex unions. “You feel proud about how far everything has come and that there's a whole community out there.”

Case in Point: The Pride Parade is not just about gay pride . One summer of attendance will show you that it's more than sexual orientation that's being celebrated. It's about getting trashed, in this great city, before lunch. It's about Chicago pride.

This year's Pride Parade will take place June 27. Make sure you're not caught unaware while riding the early-morning train.