San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Uniform fight mars Pride
We’re mere weeks away from more than a million people gathering for San Francisco’s first Pride parade in three years. And there’s drama. A battle over clothing has led to a fierce discussion about police presence at one the world’s signature Pride events.
On Monday, The Chronicle reported that the San Francisco Police Department was pulling out of the parade after Pride board members upheld their 2020 move to prevent officers from marching in uniform. The Sheriff ’s Department and Fire Department followed suit, as did newly appointed Supervisor Matt Dorsey and Mayor London Breed. It was a coordinated, rapid fire public relations effort that successfully dominated headlines for a full day.
The decision to prohibit police officers from marching in uniform has been a two-year conversation, first launched in response to the Department of Police Accountability’s refusal to pursue excessive use of force allegations after police violently arrested protesters at the 2019 Pride parade. The city settled a lawsuit with one of the victims, who is transgender, to the tune of $190,000, after they suffered a fractured wrist, concussion and partially dislocated hip during an arrest.
Since 2020, numerous meetings were held between police and Pride board members to find a way to include police in the parade in a manner that still makes the rest of the queer community feel safe. A suggestion was put forth that officers wear matching T-shirts, instead of full uniforms (which include weapons like guns and batons). Pride’s interim executive director, longtime trans activist Suzanne Ford, even offered to pay for those T-shirts.
“We were approaching it like, ‘Hey, let’s meet in the middle,’ ” Pride board President Carolyn Wysinger recalled of the many meetings. “We really tried to sit down and have a reasonable conversation. I personally hoped there would be a different outcome.”
Pride parade organizers in Denver, Minneapolis, New York and San Diego have instituted similar policies.
But in San Francisco, apparently,
“Pride is not just a riot, but a remembrance of the people who are not here.”
Vinny Eng, 2022 Pride grand marshal
it is uniforms or nothing.
“This committee would not order the leather community to wear polyester at the parade,” law enforcement officers and firefighters said in a joint statement. “This committee would not order the drag community to wear flannel. But they have told us, peace officers, that if we wear our uniforms, we may not attend.”
Being a cop is not an identity. It’s a vocation. This bizarre obsession with uniforms is presenting it otherwise.
Vinny Eng, a grand marshal for this year’s Pride parade, is disappointed with the police response.
“There is much repair yet to be done between law enforcement and the queer and trans communities,” he said, noting that the proposed policy “is not a ban on their participation, it’s a boundary conveying community standards for their participation as civilians in an event that commemorates a very violent and hurtful series of attacks on the LGBTQ community.”
Pride was founded after the 1969 riots at Stonewall Inn in New York City, where queer people — and in particular, trans people — fought back against violent police raids. Stonewall occurred just one year after similar riots broke out at Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin.
“Pride is not just a riot, but a remembrance of the people who are not here, who weren’t allowed to live their whole life safely,” Eng told me. “So many premature deaths in our community have happened because of unnecessary police violence.”
The series of urgent press releases sent out Monday from various city departments provided a distraction from an examination of one such example of police violence. That same day the state Department of Justice launched an investigation into an incident where San Francisco police responded to an alleged assault, only to apparently shoot and kill not just the assailant, but also the victim.
Now, lines are being drawn in the sand. Members of the Transgender Cultural District, which last month saw its small, six-block territory split in two by the controversial supervisorial redistricting process, released a statement Wednesday night voicing their disappointment in officials’ response.
“Mayor Breed’s decision to abstain from SF Pride Parade is a betrayal of inclusive values and ethics that have defined the city of San Francisco as a safe haven for the LGBTQ+ community for decades,” they said. If Breed holds her stance and refuses to apologize, members of the district wrote, they will not attend her flag raising ceremony or any city-sponsored Pride events. They called for other queer organizations to do the same.
It’s unlikely Breed’s absence from the parade will be noticed by most attendees. But the symbolism of her support holds weight at a time when politicians are threatening the rights of queer people across the country. For the mayor of San Francisco to pull out of the Pride parade over police officers’ refusal to ditch their uniforms would be a contentious decision at any point. But this year — as dozens of bills across the country get made into law that prevent transgender kids from accessing gender affirming care or playing team sports — it’s a disappointing betrayal.