Every year on Pink Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people flood the street outside my front door, celebrating their lives and their loves, looking for freedom. I am surrounded, and I love it. I see the crowd on the street, and I think of Jose Sarria, of Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon, and Harvey Milk. I think of the fierce queens of ACT UP and Queer Nation – too many gone now! – who refused to be silent until we as a nation began to take responsibility for our queer brothers and sisters. For me, the hearts of all those visitors are tied to my own, and we together are tied to the queer heroes who made our lives possible.
That's why I stood for election to the San Francisco Pride board of directors this past Sunday. Our annual meeting saw reformers elected by very strong margins. Almost 150 members turned out, about 20 percent of the voting membership. That's pretty good for an organization that requires folks to show up in person in order to have their votes counted in the board election. Although the results have not been ratified due to an error in the election committee's spreadsheet, I'm hopeful I will be part of the new board. I look forward to helping ensure that Pride is spirited, safe, and financially sustainable.
Whatever the final election outcome, it might be said that this is the best of times, and this is the worst of times. I am told SF Pride is now California's largest free public event. Pride may contribute as much as $100 million to the local economy each year. So the show will go on. Fortunately, the event's producers are a group of longstanding, trusted contractors who know exactly what it takes to make it all happen. Despite all the fireworks, the conflicts of the past few months have nothing to do with the finances or logistics of the event. That is a major blessing. It would make little sense to restructure Pride now, after the largest celebration ever, when the organization is back in the black following years of struggle.
On the other hand, the new board has our work cut out for us. We have to focus on healing from this year's conflicts, regaining the trust of the broader community by operating transparently and accountably, and conducting an executive director search. Far beyond the Chelsea Manning conflict and its aftermath, however, there is a spiritual crisis at hand that speaks to the purpose of Pride in a time when increasing formal recognition, particularly for marriage and immigration rights, contrasts with widening economic inequality.
I can't claim to talk for everybody: I live in the Castro, I'm a white male tech worker, and I'm keenly aware that there are many communities with whom I have too little contact to know much of anything at all. But I have spoken with hundreds of San Franciscans about the Pride parade and celebration.
In broad strokes, what I hear from the young is that Pride is largely irrelevant, little more than an excuse to party. The parade itself is an impossibility, too early on Sunday morning for those who were dancing till dawn. From the elders, especially longtime San Franciscans, I hear that Pride is frustrating: a mass-market, commercialized parody of what it used to be, a bacchanalia for straight out-of-towners. "San Francisco's Lively Gay Parade," in 1972, was the first in San Francisco to use the term Pride. There was an insurgent spirit, an irreverence about the parade that some find now to be lost.
San Francisco is changing as the continued tech boom brings new faces from the world over, driving up rents and transforming the entire Bay Area. One might argue that Pride is caught in the middle, a litmus test for the kind of city we are building together. Will our city continue to be the gay mecca that it is?
At the City Hall hearing on Pride last Thursday, Supervisor Scott Wiener expressed his opinion that Pride doesn't belong to any one nonprofit, but, he said, to the "people of San Francisco." Honored supervisor, I agree with you in principle, but I feel you forgot to mention an important detail: Pride belongs especially to the LGBT and queer people of San Francisco, to sexual and gender minorities of this city and beyond, and to the activists and organizers who made our movement possible.
This past year's celebration was exceptional. The timing with the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions on the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 meant tremendous enthusiasm for gay rights and larger-than-usual crowds. Though gay marriage is still legal in only a fraction of the 50 states, many view the past few years as a turning point, arguing that the goals of the LGBT rights movement are largely achieved. I beg to differ.
If you're a refugee from someplace more homophobic, Pride offers you the opportunity to find people who share your heart and spirit. By throwing the United States' largest Pride celebration, we are saying to queers the world over: you can come home to San Francisco, and we will welcome you. Pride is thus an incredibly valuable tool. It's one of the key means by which we can demonstrate San Francisco values, teach our history, and – for a little while, at least – liberate our people.
Even if half of Pride's attendees are straight, we should welcome them. My hope is that they will discover something precious in the values of LGBT liberation. Those straight folks may be looking for something that queerness can offer them, a certain freedom they can allow ourselves, or not. It is a freedom of sexual and gender expressiveness, a freedom to accept our bodies and their desires, a freedom to experiment, adapt to change, and find new ways to love.
Jesse Oliver Sanford is a San Francisco resident.