San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
50 YEARS OF PRIDE
In words and images, a look at five decades of raucous celebration and hardwon acceptance.
Last June, a group of protesters lay down in the intersection of Market and Sixth streets. They made a bed of the warm asphalt and streetcar tracks. They chanted “F— the police!” and “Pride was a riot.” And for nearly an hour that morning they halted San Francisco’s annual Pride Parade.
There were shouts to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and calls for San Francisco Pride to exclude the police. Eventually, two people were arrested and the parade continued.
This all made headlines, but the truth is San Francisco’s Pride Parade, for all its rainbows and smiles and messages of love and togetherness, has never been a simple and tidy thing. Not then, not ever.
“The parade has been so many things,” says Fred Lopez, the executive director of San Francisco Pride. “It’s been protest marches . ... For some, they feel like it’s been too commercial and there’s a lot of logos. And for some who work for companies who are represented in the parade, it’s a really big deal to feel accepted and elevated by one’s employer for that month, for that day.
“That’s always been the joy and the challenge of Pride organizers to acknowledge that and to sort of fold it in and embrace it.”
Last month this year’s Pride Parade was canceled — another in a long stream of public events waiting for a pandemic to pass. Few are likely happy about this, but the quiet does offer space for introspection and reflection.
Before San Francisco Pride was San Francisco Pride, it was Gay Liberation Day and before that, it was
Christopher Street West, a commemoration of the 1969 Christopher Street Stonewall Riots in New York City.
San Francisco queers marked the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots with a small march down Polk Street and a GayIn at Golden Gate Park. Two years later, in 1972, the city’s LGBTQ community held what The Chronicle called “S.F.’s Lively Gay Parade.” There were more than 2,000 people marching “with full flourish through 22 blocks of the city.” Some 15,000 people watched as the marchers walked from Montgomery Street to City Hall with “elaborate gay horseback riders, marching bands and drag queens throwing kisses.” There were gay celebrities (Mr. Gayzette), a gay wedding, a gay clown on skates and gay Boy Scouts.
And then there was this at the end of it all: “(D)ifferent gay factions were pushing and shoving for possession of the microphone.” A reverend was kicked and shoved. Lesbians said they were not given a chance to speak. “Militant male groups also said their spokesman had been barred.”
Gay liberation, like all civil rights movements, has been a rhythmic tide — high, then low, then high, then low again — but unpredictable all the same.
Take “recent” history. In 2004, thenMayor Gavin Newsom allowed samesex marriage, only to have the state Supreme Court void it in 2008. Lawsuits followed and then a state proposition and then more lawsuits. Legal; then not; legal; then not — until, 10 years later, in 2018, the right to marry extended to all couples nationwide. This year, the United States Supreme Court enshrined the right to work for all LGBTQ people.
The tide is just as evident in San Francisco’s Pride parade.
Marke Bieschke, a multihyphenate if ever there were one (nightlife historian, bar owner, DJ, author, 48 Hills editor), has experienced much of the recent ebb and flow. He came to San Francisco the day after Pride in 1994. “The city was completely trashed,” he says. “I remember seeing just all the detritus and everything and being like ‘This is all gay trashy.’ ”
This, he says, was his first real Pride, even though it had passed. He’d known Detroit’s Pride, but that was a picnic, not days of floats and parties and political discussions about queer rights.
“These were things that just blew my mind,” he says. “I gradually had to relearn the history of Pride because I feel like we go through these cycles again and again of where Pride is and where it started.” Not just Stonewall, but earlier riots and uprisings — San Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, for example. (Just this month he published a book about these movements and more: “Into the Streets: A Young Person's Visual History of Protest in the United States.”)
Bieschke watched Gay Shame march against the Pride parade. He saw, in 2015, 8,000 Apple employees add hours to the program, and that same year saw the Dyke March splinter reclaim its original, separate route, against city orders. He’s witnessed the Trans March grow from a small group of people to something much more — “just dazzling to watch.”
A digital exhibit from San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society, “Labor of Love,” charts the movement’s early progress and growth here. From Stonewall to the GayIn to the first parade. By 1975, Harvey Milk was arguing that Gay Freedom Day was due more money — “funds equal in proportion to the turnout of other parades.” Three years later, The Chronicle photographed him riding a car at the front of the Pride Parade, leading a fight against an initiative that would bar gay teachers from working. Four months later, he was assassinated.
Through it all, the community argued — about representation, about funding, about respectability or lack thereof.
Amy Sueyoshi, the dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, is one of the curators alongside Gerard Koskovich and Don Romesburg. She also sits on Pride’s board of directors. The arguments persist.
“I did find the contentions were absolutely exhausting,” she says. “Legitimate. But exhausting.”
Curating the exhibit, learning this was nothing new, helped, though. “There’s always been contention. That sort of made the burden less weighty for me. The work of Pride, the labor of Pride, was something our predecessors took on as well. And not lightly.”
So what comes next? “I think at the center of most, if not of all, of what Pride does is really putting a premium on visibility,” Pride Executive Director Lopez says. “We can’t write visibility off as something that isn’t important anymore. It’s clear that there are people in this world that would like those hard fought rights taken away.”
“We think we need corporations more than they need us,” Bieschke says. “But the truth is corporations need us way more . ... What we need to do is use our imagination and our bravery to move beyond the corporate model and the policing model that we’ve relied on and come up with our own things.”
“If folks could come together, it could be like an oldfashioned lezzie potluck but with thousands and thousands of people,” Sueyoshi says. “Some kind of free event that could be massive but still friendly and safe and obviously not rooted in the exchange of money or capital or anything like that, but more about just exchanging ideas and love and community.”
Gay liberation has always been a rhythmic tide — high, then low, then high, then low again. So has Pride and its parade.
The official 2020 parade has been canceled, but protest parades are planned, on Polk Street in the Tenderloin, near Dolores Park in the Mission.
This is how, in 2020, the parade shifts, once again, to fit the moment.