I went to the Pride parade to see the Dykes on Bykes. I'm a biker. Here are two photos. They are really having fun. In both, they have left Market Street and are headed for 7th Street South of Market which had been kept open for parking the many hundreds of motorcycles.
The parade was fun. I only watched a tiny part of it. I loved the 100 balloon people who make balloons into weird objects, the way circus clowns do. I loved the half dozen teams of adult cheerleaders. Fun and joy can be formal institutions...like the gay love of musical theater.
The parade ends at Civic Center with the biggest open street fair I have ever seen. Every imaginable business has a booth. Three cheers for commerce.
The entire Pride event is fun, raucous and much loved by the million people involved. To what do we owe this incredible gift?
I had to remember two things that explain why we have such a great event as the Pride parade: creativity and perversity. Creativity, as we Americans understand it, is a flowering of individual personality. It is self-expression. Creativity thrives where governance is weak and social control is light. Suburbs and Dallas are not centers of creativity and flowering individual expression because the government is effective and 'society' joins together to expect people to behave 'properly'.
The San Francisco police are consciously ineffective, they don't hassle
naked middle-class party goers and they don't waste time tracking down
gang murderers either.
Many attempts at social control are perverse. Thank-god.
The military hated San Francisco for its sexual license and its
communist politics so, in 1946, the military discharged all the gay men
with dishonorable discharges in San Francisco. A first step toward the Pride parade.
Lizzie
Glide, in 1932, gave all her deceased husband's oil money from Kern
County, to start a Southern Methodist church in the worst neighborhood
to be the 'light of Jesus unto the sinners'. By 1965, Glide church with
Reverend Ted McIlvenna
as a community organizer became the center of gay organizing and Glide
did the sexual training for all the doctors, medical professionals and
ministers in America. (Phylis, in photo above, worked for Ted at Glide.)
I love perversity. The idiots at the SF School Board and the S.F. voters have eliminate High School ROTC. Who knows the perverse outcome. San Francisco is likely to be the home to the first professional guerilla mercenary training school 20 years from now. Expect them, with weapons, to be marching in the Pride parade too.