pogoism

I promised y’all a post about San Francisco Pride, and here it is! Albeit a week late…

I went with Emily, Alonso, Jaime and Camron on Friday night and we arrived at the hostel. Whenever I go to SF I normally stay downtown or city center, but this time I wanted to stay somewhere different, so we stayed in the Mission District. That’s somewhere I’ve never been before, and there’s not much of SF I haven’t been to on one trip or another. It’s like the multicultural area of the city, like the East End of London, I guess. Anyway, it’s really nice, loads of great places to eat, a buzzing atmosphere and it seems very distinct from the rest of the city.

Saturday consisted of going to Civic Center for the party there (dance music for the first time in 10 months!), doing some shopping and then in the evening we headed to the Castro for the Pink Party. It was phenomenal – they blocked off the Castro at both ends, and the place was filled with gays. It ended at midnight though, so we ended up wandering around finding somewhere to eat and battling through the crowds…

After an unwelcome early start on Sunday, we headed to somewhere near Fisherman’s Wharf to see the parade. It started with some people I mentioned in a previous post, people who have been together for 30-ish years. I always get a little emotional at these things, particularly when I see so many straight people standing around in support, who have made the effort to come down. SF Pride isn’t quite the freak show I had expected, and I get the impression they’ve been told to tone it down. In Belfast and London, and I’m sure most other cities, Pride parades are dominated by drag queens and almost naked men. Which is fine, I don’t mind. But that’s what the media latches onto, and it gives the hideous right-wing idiots something to put in their pathetic email propaganda. Even some of the gays I’ve spoken to who are against the idea of Pride cite this as the main reason. So it was refreshing to see a genuine diversity of people represented in SF.

Here’s some photos! (And there’s loads more over at my Flickr page)

I was going through my RSS feeds this morning when I awoke, and a post on the WordPress blog alerted me to the fact that it was National Blog Posting Month. I guess this is a little like National Novel Writing Month, only with blogs, and you have to post once a day for a month. Over the last few weeks I’ve been struggling for inspiration, and I worried that I might be getting tired of blogging, so I’m hoping this will give me the drive I need to continue…

Anyway, I digress. If you want to find out more about NaBloPoMo, click on the link above.

There doesn’t seem a theme for July yet, so for my first post of July, I’ll go with June’s theme: Heroes.

Last weekend I was at San Francisco Pride, one of the most famous and best-attended prides in the world. It was also a special year this year, as it was the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. I plan to post another time about what I got up to, but for now I’m going to tell you about my heroes.

There they are. See those signs? “George and Wayne, 29 years” “Bill and Chris, 31 years”

I don’t know these people. I’ve never seen them before, and I’ll probably never see them again. But what they’ve achieved, and what they stand for is amazing. All across America, and the world, we’re constantly being told that gay marriage will destroy the sanctity of it – and yet here’s the proof that it won’t.

These weren’t the only 3 examples in the parade, there were probably thousands and committed same-sex partners represented, many of them with healthy, happy kids. I’ll be honest, whenever I see couples like this, I get emotional. Its a sweet thing to see in world where we’re being constantly told that it can never happen, and a reminder to us all that there is some hope.

My heroes for the day: George and Wayne, Bill and Chris, and all the other same-sex couples out there proving everyone wrong.