SAN FRANCISCO — They’re here. It’s their year. And on Sunday, for the first time in the history of the Gay Pride parade, more of them than ever before were texting their wedding planners.
Get used to it.
The Pride parade came into existence 43 years ago as a reaction to the Stonewall incident, during which New York cops beat up several patrons in a gay bar. This year’s event took its marching orders from the U.S. Supreme Court, which handed down a historic ruling just four days before the parade, essentially overturning Proposition 8 and making same-sex marriage legal in California. By Friday, a parade down the matrimonial aisle began as soon as the 9th Circuit Court stayed its original order, allowing weddings to commence.
The day produced a perfect clear blue sky, and yet as the parade followed its traditional course up Market Street to Civic Center Plaza, it formed a dazzling rainbow, made up of a million and a half celebrants, according to the San Francisco police. It felt like a giant wedding reception, and though there were plenty of crazy uncles there, it was conducted with remarkable restraint. “It’s a lot of people,” said police spokesman Sgt. Dennis Toomer, “but everyone is pretty happy and just having a good time.”
Probably happiest of all were the two newlywed couples whose legal challenge of Prop. 8 made the party possible. The couples — Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, of Berkeley; and Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo, of Burbank — received thunderous applause from the crowd as they floated the unlikely dreamscape in a pair of convertibles. Scurrying alongside the cars were attendants carrying cartoon-style signs that read, “Prop. 8-Kapow!”
California Attorney General Kamala Harris, whose refusal to defend Prop. 8 was what ultimately led to it being overturned, rode down Market in a cabernet-colored classic Buick convertible. “This is a culmination of all the parades before it,” said Harris. These “parades were always full of hope, and full of vision, and full of fight and commitment.”
She trailed Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who presided over the first wave of gay marriages at City Hall as mayor in 2006 and was greeted by the adoring crowd as both hero and hunky heartthrob.
Daft punks
A different sort of parade started hours earlier at BART stations throughout the Bay Area, where half-an-hour lines formed at ticket kiosks. At the Fremont station, a woman wearing shorts and a Mohawk haircut played “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk on a boom box, and suddenly the whole line began singing in unison. Some danced. Everybody got goose bumps. Every car into the city was packed with excited, sweating people, some with face paint that was running from the sauna-like conditions. It seemed likely that BART easily doubled its typical Sunday ridership. A spokeswoman for the agency tweeted that Sunday’s ridership numbers wouldn’t be available until Monday, when the transit agency’s workers were scheduled to go on strike.
The event had all the customary trappings of a parade: Companies such as Safeway and Kaiser Permanente sponsored floats as an expression of goodwill, while others seemed intent on attracting new customers. McMillan Electric put in service a flatbed truck it dubbed “Court of the Wild Kingdom,” with a cross-dressing go-go dancer in rainbow lamé, beneath a golden crown. They were trailing along behind Empress Marlene XXV, a statuesque drag queen of a certain age, who had ridden in the parade four times, but never before as a grand marshal.
“I love the parade because it’s so magnificent,” said the Empress. She didn’t care much for the emphasis on gay marriage, however. “There are better places to fight at politics than the Gay Pride parade,” she said. “But the marriage act that just came down makes this year very special. There are people at City Hall right now getting married.”
Remarkably, there were almost no serious protesters along the parade route. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy denied one final attempt to reverse Wednesday’s decision on Sunday morning, and with that, the Prop. 8 backers appeared to fold their tents. There was one guy spewing invective at passersby from a bullhorn, while wearing a T-shirt that said, “Jesus Like You,” but his dismay with the gay lifestyle seemed to be of long standing. He instructed sinners to “read your bible,” then as he finished screaming about the pit of hell to which they were all about to descend, he concluded with, “I love you all.”
There was lots of love to go around.
‘Like’ the parade
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, marched for the first time, according to parade organizers, although he managed to melt into the middle of about a hundred dancing Facebookers who seemed to “Like” the parade. The Wall Street Journal reported up to 700 Zuck employees — 15 percent of the staff — attended the festivities, and photos of them were all over social media. As half-naked men in gold lame hotpants — seemingly borne aloft by angel’s wings but actually walking on stilts — passed by a bewildered Jeff and Andrea Vlahovich, the couple stood at the curb next to a pair of large suitcases on wheels. They had just landed following a 15-hour flight from their home in Sydney, Australia, which, coincidentally, is home of the world’s largest Gay Pride parade. Their hotel was just two blocks away but on the wrong side of Market.
“We had no idea this would be going on,” Jeff said. “But it looks pretty great.”
“There’s a really good vibe here,” Andrea concluded. “Everybody seems so happy. I wonder why.”
One person who wouldn’t be around to explain it to them was the new Archbishop of the San Francisco diocese, who had departed for a conference with the Pope at Vatican City earlier in the week. Before leaving, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, who had campaigned for Prop. 8, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the Supreme Court’s ruling changes “the basic understanding of marriage from a child-centered institution to one that sees it as a temporary, revocable commitment which prioritizes the romantic happiness of adults over building a loving, lasting family.”
Megan Callaghan, 22, a San Francisco native who just moved back to the city after attending college in Oregon, was wearing a lime green tulle tutu, purple roller blades, a rainbow bikini top and pink angel wings. She described herself as a “skate fairy.” Callaghan was excited about the parade’s marital zeitgeist. “It means for the first time I’ll have the opportunity to marry somebody of my same sex in the city I grew up in.” She said she didn’t have anybody in mind yet, then added, “There’s definitely nothing like this in Oregon.”
On Sunday, there was nothing like it anywhere.
Staff writer Mark Emmons and The Associated Press contributed to this story. Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004. Follow him on Twitter at BruceNewmanTwit.
