The moment for which San Francisco has long been readying itself finally arrived this past weekend, with a litany of Pride festivities beginning on Friday and reaching a crescendo with the June 26th Pride Parade.
The city’s uncontainable spirit of queer joy and political resistance was palpable even before Sunday’s culminatory parade: as the Trans March on Friday proceeded down Market Street, participants encountered several other protesters condemning the SCOTUS’s recently announced decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The various crowds coalesced into a super-group united simultaneously by political rage and joyful solidarity.
See also: All The Best Colorful Outfits From San Francisco's 52nd Pride Parade
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Saturday witnessed the equally exuberant Dyke March, which launched from Dolores Park and snaked out through the Castro. While the day before’s political disenchantment lingered, the Dyke March kept spirits high and celebrated defiantly.
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That joy carried over into the main event, Sunday’s massive Pride Parade and Celebration, the centerpiece of which was a Pride village erected in and around the Civic Center Plaza. Featuring a Latin Stage, API Pavilion, and Women’s Stage, the village testified to Pride’s commitment to fostering and foregrounding intersectionality among queer and other marginalized identities. Other themed areas included the unabashedly kinky Leather Alley and the rollicking Country-Western Dance Corral.
Cruising in the parade itself were the usual suspects: elaborately-costumed Samba dancers, furries, visiting politicians, celebrity Grand Marshals like Vinny Eng and Sherry Cola, and corgis in rainbow tutus.
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The main event stage hosted an array of dynamic acts and speakers all afternoon; among them were drag cabaret performances, celebrity and politician speeches, and the Latinx band La Dona, which transformed the Civic Center Plaza into a salsa dance floor.
See also: Unidentified Objects Film Receives Astronomical Acclaim At SF LGTBQ+ Film Festival
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The standout speech that most riveted and electrified the crowd was delivered by Oakland-born celebrity Grand Marshal Amy Schneider, the record-setting Jeopardy! Champion and paragon of trans excellence.
She deftly negotiated the grim political realities besetting the queer community while maintaining Pride’s ethos of love, hope, and collective resistance: “Pride is not safe, not inoffensive; it is a political statement. It is a statement to a society that still hates us that we will not be silenced.”
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She opposed herself to the pessimism and political resignation to which many are falling prey after so many seemingly insurmountable setbacks, explaining that minds and hearts can indeed be changed: “I can’t tell you how many people have told me about people in their lives whose views on trans people were changed - permanently changed - through nothing else than seeing one trans person on their television, proud of her identity”.
The mere act of living outwardly as queer in a heteronormative society is, as she went on to articulate, a form of resistance “We must force everyone in this country to deal with that discomfort and question what they’ve been told, and one of the simplest ways we can do that is by existing … by refusing the idea that we have anything, any one damn thing, to apologize for”.
Schneider’s ardently enunciated invective beautifully encapsulates the spirit of this year’s Pride, a spirit characterized by anger as well as celebratory euphoria, both being equally necessary. This weekend’s celebration reminded everyone who participated that though the forces arrayed against the most vulnerable communities in our population are formidable, so are we.
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See also: 10 Bay Area and National Organizations With LGBTQ+ Resources to Platform For Pride Month
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