PHOTOS: Reliving the Guts & Glory Of San Francisco Pride Through The Decades

San Francisco has changed radically since 1970, going from a sleepy artistic backwater to international powerhouse, but one thing remains the same: each June it’s time to celebrate loud and proud. The City by the Bay will host its 46th Pride celebration on Saturday, June 25 and Sunday, June 26.

This year, the cast of Transcendent will serve as celebrity Grand Marshal, Peaches will perform at the Main Stage celebration at Civic Center, and Black Lives Matter has been selected as Community Grand Marshal by local voters. Pride is expected to welcome almost two million participants during the festival weekend and Sunday parade, all coming to celebrate the 2016 theme of Racial and Economic Justice for All. This year should be particularly fierce and fiery, coming on the heels of the atrocity in Orlando and on the anniversary of marriage equality for all.

But SF Pride is by no means a modern celebration. It’s more of a decades-old tradition that’s been happening since before Harvey Milk was an LGBT icon, since even before the Castro was the world’s greatest gay mecca.

“San Francisco has changed over the last few years in that it feels new,” SF Pride board president Michelle Meow said. “I’m lucky to be among those who are still here to tell stories from 50 years ago when the gay liberation movement started for us in San Francisco.”

The early years

Those stories might start in 1970, with just 30 “hair fairies” marching down Polk Street, San Francisco’s O.G. gayborhood. The crowd grew as they marched to Golden Gate Park for a “gay in” that became known as Christopher Street Liberation Day.

Although there was no similar gay celebration in 1971, there was a queer-friendly parade down Folsom Street in 1971 called the Age of Aquarius. Yep, this is in the San Francisco history books, folks. The following year, Gay Pride came back with a vengeance on June 25, 1972. Renamed Christopher Street West, this predecessor attracted over 50,000 people celebrating for the first time in Civic Center, and it laid the groundwork for LGBT parades to come.

From 1973 to 1980, it was known as Gay Freedom Day, and attendance skyrocketed to 250,000 people. During that time most of the post-parade celebrations took place in Civic Center, expect for a particularly balmy Pride in 1976 when the temperature reached 94 degrees. Understandably, festival-goers decided to celebrate in Golden Gate Park, and some decided to do so without any clothes on. Oh, the 70s. This clothing-optional Pride celebration actually provided footage for Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign, so some Pride goers at the time got to check that off their list.

A modern celebration

From 1981 to 1994, Pride became known as the International Lesbian & Gay Freedom Day Parade, but since 1995 its full name has been the San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Celebration. Since it’s inception, the event has had a wide range of superstar performers, from Grace Jones to Lady Gaga.

In 1993 came the Dyke March, an unofficial gathering of queer women and supporters that has taken place every year on Pride Saturday. About 50,000 participants start off at Dolores Park in a march that culminates in the Castro. Since it started, the Dyke March organizers have never applied for a permit from the city of San Francisco, citing their First Amendment Right to congregate in public.

In June 2004 the Trans March started, quickly becoming the largest transgender event in the world. Similar to the Dyke March, participants march from Dolores Park to Civic Center on the Friday before Pride.

Last year, Laverne Cox and almost 20,000 other people participated in the march and City Hall was lit up in the colors of the trans pride flag.

Photos: Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover, MoonieRocks

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Instagram’s Gay Spanish Teacher Has a Phrase We All Need to Learn: WATCH

Occasionally we struggle to find the words during difficult moments. It’s even harder to find the words if you need to say them in another language. Thankfully, Gay Spanish Teacher Julian Eternal and Michael Grammar are here to help.

Your lesson for today:

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Rachel Maddow Interviews Gay Former Islamic Extremist: WATCH

Rachel Maddow had some insights on how the combination of self-hatred, homophobia and radicalism can add to catastrophic and deadly results.

In the Rachel Maddow Show Friday, she sat down with Sohail Ahmed, a self-described reformed Islamic extremist who also happens to be gay. He told her about his experiences as a gay muslim who was taught to think of his sexuality as an “abomination,” and how he planned on dealing with it.

Ahmed explained that he had become increasingly more radicalized in an attempt to “cure” his “homosexuality” as a teenager, and that the situation escalated in such a way that at one point, he was “seriously considering carrying out attacks.”

His idea was to “make a homemade explosive device, plant it at a location and detonate it remotely.” He’d even decided where: Canary Wolf, a “redeveloped area in East London,” because it symbolized “how rich” London was.

RELATED: FBI ‘Increasingly Skeptical’ That Orlando Shooter Was Gay and Closeted

Interestingly, what made him change his mind was the very thing he was planning on doing.

After terrorists killed 52 people in London on July 7, 2005, Ahmed started having doubts about his views. He looked for answers and found articles by the Quilliam Foundation, “the world’s first counter extremism think tank,” which made him finally realize that extremism was an “evil ideology” which “must be stopped in its roots.”

At the same time, Ahmed was also struggling with his sexuality, even though he’d never thought of himself as gay — even after he was “de-radicalized,” he said. “All I knew was that I had same-sex attractions, but I assumed that they were simply there temporarily, or that I was possessed, or that they were a deviation of my internal nature.”

Only after Ahmed finally “managed to find the courage” to question everything he knew about homosexuality, and after he found scientific studies that showed that being gay was “natural,” he was able to came out to himself. “For the first time ever, I was happy to be Muslim and happy to be gay, he said.”

Maddow asked him if he thought the Orlando shooter could’ve been gay himself, as it’s been speculated by the media.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Imagine being brought up believing that you are an abomination, that you are evil and that you should hide who you are. That would result in internalized homophobia, which would then turn into externalized homophobia. On top of that, given that there are significant mainstream conservative traditionalist interpretations of Islam that stipulate that gay people should be killed, it’s not surprising that he would end up on a shooting spree.”

Check out Maddow’s full, fascinating interview below:

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‘Golden’ is a Short Film About How Gay People Find a Safe Space in the World: WATCH

Golden is a short film by Kai Stänicke about how gay people find their safe space in the world. The film has been making the rounds at European festivals. Last year it won the OUTtv Audience Award at Holebifilmfestival Vlaams-Brabant and Best Short at the Florence Queer Film Festival and the Audience Award for Best Short at Arouca Film Festival in Portugal.

Writes Stänicke on Facebook:

In the wake of the tragedy in Orlando a friend asked me to put my short film Golden online so she can share it with some friends. If it can spread just a tiny bit of love in these devastating times, the film fulfilled its purpose.

Wherever you are and not matter how tough times are right now: You are never alone. You have a place in life and together we gonna make sure it’s a safe one.

Watch:

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Orlando Residents Make Pulse Permanent With Matching Tattoos

Some say it’s passé to get a tattoo that many other people have. In Orlando, coordinated tattoos have become a symbol of solidarity and support for those impacted by the massacre at LGBT nightclub Pulse. 

www.advocate.com/pride/2016/6/19/orlando-residents-make-pulse-permanent-matching-tattoos