Happy Pride Month to everyone, and Happy Pride Celebrations to folks in San Francisco and close by: today, tomorrow and Sunday.
FRIDAY, JUNE 28, 2024—Trans Pride
Today and tonight feature the Trans March at 6pm in Dolores Park in SF, with festivities starting at 11am. It’s the 20th Anniversary of the March, so wear your finest and be your most fabulous! Allies are welcome, but trans folk only in the March.
Recently, our rights and existence have come under active, intense attack. It is even more critical that we gather this year to fight back, resist, celebrate, create community, uplift our achievements to be where we are now, and face the challenges that lie in our path forward. Let’s show our solidarity and unity.
Let’s make this a huge showing of how powerful and wonderful we are!
Trans March website
SATURDAY, JUNE 29, 2024 – Dyke Pride, but yikes—the official Dyke March is cancelled!
[UPDATE] The march went on anyway! See https://missionlocal.org/2024/06/dyke-march-celebration-continues-2024/ for details and photos.
There will not be an official San Francisco Dyke March this Pride weekend, according to organizers. The long-running Pride institution has been taking place at Dolores Park since the 1990s, but a recent change in leadership has prompted organizers to put it on hold. They plan to use Saturday — the day the march would normally take place — to recruit community members and plan ahead for Pride 2025
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Dyke March organizing committee has dwindled due to a combination of factors, including inter-community conflicts around racism and trans-inclusion, the deaths of several leaders, and burnout. The remaining members of the group resigned earlier this month.
“It’s going to take a lot of community healing,” said one member of the new group, M. Rocket. “There’s been so much unrest over the years and then so much disconnection during the pandemic.”
…
But a march may still happen on Saturday afternoon. Dolores Park is a hub for lesbians, queer women, and gender nonconforming people at SF Pride, so an unofficial celebration could form organically, said a member of the new group, Koja Ray.
“As one of the many marginalized communities in the LGBTQ+ world, dykes are underrepresented and do not have many of the spaces that other groups have,” Rocket said. “So dykes taking to the streets is a matter of taking space, of being visible, to be able to stand up and be proud and celebrate our art and our culture.”
News outlet KQED
Please read the full KQED article for more on this issue—I’ve just picked out highlights. I plan to go to Dolores Park and celebrate being a queer woman by making posters, yelling, and hanging out with longtime friends. Stop by—if you can find us amongst the crowds! Again, allies welcome, but dykes, lesbians, queer women, and gender nonconforming people only in the March, if there is one.
SUNDAY, JUNE 30, 2024—Pride Parade and Celebration
Sunday is the “mainstream” Pride celebration, with corporate sponsors, celebrity stage performances and a lot of non-queer gate-crashers. Most of the Pride celebration has been commercialized to the point that I don’t even go anymore. It’s a party, not a riot, the way it was in its first years. I moved to San Francisco in the late 1980s and it still felt transgressive, then, to be out and proud in public. I’m not sure today’s revelers know how scary it was back then. It took even more courage to march in the Parade before my time, in its first years. Yes, this is my moment of “Kids these days!” and “We had to walk uphill in the snow both ways!” I’m VERY glad the world is safer for today’s queer folk, but I don’t want them to forget the past. And with Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in his debate with Trump last night (June 27, 2024), we are that much closer to a Trump presidency that will take all our rights away again.
The best part of the Pride Parade is always the Dyke on Bikes contingent that starts it off. I’ve done a bunch of design for the Women’s Motorcycle Contingent, the organization that runs DoB, which has always been fun, rewarding and well-received.
You can see more of my queer-oriented posts at Supreme Court’s ruling overturns both the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8; Fans Font Friday 2 – Klackin; Fonting while Queer Font Friday; (Rainbow) Flag Font Friday; and “Burdened With Glorious Purpose” merchandise artwork.
EVERY DAY—for queers and allies and anyone else who wants democracy and the rule of law to continue in this country.
Commit to doing political work to get the word out that we need to organize and fight! Combat the forces that would, if given the chance, take away the rights of everyone who isn’t a white, heterosexual, cis, Christian, conservative, rich, male. Some easy ways:
- https://www.activateamerica.vote/ – “Reach out to voters to support Democrats and defeat Republican extremists.” They have several different campaigns you can do at any given time: writing postcards, text banking or phone banking.
- https://postcardstovoters.org/ – “Postcards to Voters are friendly, handwritten reminders from volunteers to targeted voters giving Democrats a winning edge in close, key races coast to coast.”
- https://www.turnoutpac.org/postcards/ – “Help write postcards to voters in 11 key swing states! We’ll mail you free postcards, voter lists and instructions with proven message options. You’ll provide the stamps and mail the postcards to voters in October.”
All these organization will give you lists of people to contact and a short script to write, text, or say. Friends of mine have regular “postcarding parties”: we get together and write postcards while talking, laughing and eating snacks. I even had one myself last weekend—it’s easy and fun. Five of us wrote 25 postcards each over the course of a few hours for 125 total! (You don’t have to do that many, of course.)
