I’ve been Out in Gay Mecca for 20 years. On the last Sunday of every June, I make a beeline from some point west of the Ferry Building down to City Hall, crammed between convertibles and motorcycles, dodging men on roller skates dressed in day-glo G-strings and bristling with balloons, and batting down pamphlets against gale-force winds. I have helped build giant glitter-encrusted plywood cakes and a 4-foot-tall Music Man hats that are screwed onto flatbed trucks and roped to booth supports. But in 20 years, I’ve never actually seen the Pride Parade. Never watched it live end to end from a Market Street sidewalk.
As long as I’ve been Out, I’ve only seen the half block of the parade occupied by the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band at any given moment.
That and whatever contingent rides ahead of our banner, whatever contingent cruises behind our sousaphones, and the faces and photographers on either side. I joined the Band in 1991 specifically to have someone to go to the parade with, and she’s been my date every year since.
The first year I marched, the parade was amazing. I’d gone through my “I’m The Only One” phase in San Francisco (proving you really can do anything if you set your mind to it). My boss had told me that she fired a man for being gay and then noted my blushing as a smoking gun. When my clenched teeth turned into a rapid-fire eyelid tic, I quit the job and joined the Band. That year seeing Market Street festooned with rainbow flags, I secretly felt Pride was a party thrown for me. And when my band and I turned onto Market Street playing “California, Here I Come,” the roar of a million people cheering bounced around the skyscrapers over our heads and I felt like Dorothy entering the Rainbow City. Ding dong the witch was dead indeed!
Twenty years later, coming up on Pride 2011, the magic of the rainbow had worn thin before my middle-aging eyes. The Pride Committee had chalked up more abdications than Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign. After last year’s fund juggling, the theme “In Pride We Trust”
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