no return and no deposit
The last time I wrote a Pride newsletter, I was still living in Halifax, and I’d just come back from watching the parade. I sat under a tree with friends and strangers and cried about a float playing Lizzo’s “Water Me.” I think it was literally a water company’s float? The thing is that it all felt really bad that year. I was so happy to be surrounded by queerness that I became acutely emotionally susceptible. It happens, I am told, to the best of us.
If it felt bad in 2023, it feels orders of magnitude worse in 2025. I don’t need to go into it, which is cool, because I also don’t want to go into it. I am trying to hang onto the way I felt this weekend, when I walked in two marches and listened to queer musicians and briefly imagined a future I could – not endure, not only that. A future I could actively want.
We went to Trans March on Friday. Trans March has retained the kind of edge that mainline Pride tends to lack, which, for my money, makes it the best day of SF Pride weekend. It feels like a protest. Even in happier years it has felt that way, but this year trans people have a staggering amount to object to. There was a lot of joy, surrounded as we were by our colleagues and our friends, but there was also a lot of highly justified anger and defiance.
(This is why Daniel Lurie, our freshly-inducted nepo-baby mayor, got booed out of Dolores Park. Of course he wasn’t welcome! Not only is he the mayor – not only is he cutting funding that people rely on – he specifically didn’t raise the trans flag at City Hall this year, and he hasn’t precisely stepped up for the city in the face of state terror. Compare and contrast New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and Newark mayor Ras Baraka. You don’t get to leave people out to dry and then come and stand next to them for a photo opportunity! Sorry! Anyway I heard the booing and it was, can confirm, very funny.)
That’s not to say it was all booing. We hung out with friends, and I watched someone’s kid wander happily from picnic blanket to picnic blanket, scavenging snacks and picking up unfamiliar objects and chatting away to new people. Everyone was delighted by this. The whole crowd was so sweet to this kid, from the shirtless punks to the teenagers draped in flags to the furry-adjacent girls in their cat ears. It felt like community. It’s easy to forget, when you’re by yourself and anxious about the future, how beautiful and generous people can be.
What moved me most, though, was the people lining the route as we walked. The local queer synagogue handed out seltzers and snack bars! Total strangers waved from their fire escapes! Sometimes, I’m afraid, you really need to see a bunch of people holding up signs that say things like we are with you and trans rights are human rights and keep your fucking hands off my beautiful trans wife. Even if they’re cis! With the world taking the shape that it’s trying to take, it means so much more than usual not to feel like we’re being left behind.
We marched to Civic Center, then skipped out on the rally to go to SF Opera’s first ever Pride concert. Hosted by Sapphira Cristál! An opera singer sang Melissa Etheridge for us! The whole auditorium was a beautiful canvas for beautiful video projections during the music! Impossible to be mad at any of this. A regrettable but needful fact: since this concert, I’ve had Harvey Fierstein’s “I Am What I Am” in my head on repeat. Sometimes it is necessary to remember. I don’t know.
And then on Sunday we walked in the actual, literal San Francisco Pride Parade. When I say this event is an undertaking, I mean it. All the sidestreets off Market were lined with parade floats waiting to happen; it was like a gridlock of miniature block parties. We walked with the UCSF group, and we were staged next to a queer marching band, so we spent our hour-and-a-half of waiting to walk rocking out to brass arrangements of Chappell Roan.
Other lovely things about the Pride Parade:
Dogs. So many dogs. This is Bear, a senior dog with the look and feel of a beautiful cloud:
BEAR Friendship. I chatted to so many people who happen to share my workplace, and who I would otherwise never have met. (My workplace is a big, sprawling institution that has a lot of functions and not a lot of interdepartmental communication. But not on Pride!)
The crowd! It is so rarely acceptable to yell at a stranger that their scissoring-themed t-shirt is amazing, or that you love their pup hood/harness/nipple piercings. Turns out that when you do this from a Pride parade everyone is very happy to hear it.
Isaac. It was genuinely really special to do this with him. Between the long fight we had to get me to the U.S. and the ongoing fight we are having with our own sense of dread in the face of all things, I really feel like we have a lot to be proud of.
The city. This weekend was San Francisco at its best, the way I will always try to remember it. Everything is colourful, vibrant, absolutely buzzing with joy. Everyone is happy to be there, and to see each other. There’s strength and courage and hope in the sheer number of us, all standing together. To which end —
The vibes. It would be kind of rich to say that Pride is really a protest, when we were getting ready next to Gilead, Disney, and multiple upwardly-mobile politicians. But there were angrier signs than usual this year, across all the subjects you’d hope and expect to see. They were lowkey in the hands of the politicians, even: Scott Wiener had an anti-ICE sign, and good for him.
Pride at its best is a reminder. It points us toward where we came from, what we’re fighting for, and who we can be at our bravest. The GLBT Historical Society – Isaac’s old workplace – has its archives underneath Market Street. We were literally marching over history. At this awful moment in the long narrative of a nation, it is worth remembering that we come from a proud tradition of being mad as hell and not about to take it anymore. We have it in us, and we won’t go quietly.
I love you. Happy Pride (and Wrath, and (I hope for all of us eventually) Sloth).
