Pride 2023

Started: 2024-01-20 21:59:44

Submitted: 2024-01-20 23:22:05

Visibility: World-readable

A somewhat belated recap of the San Francisco Pride parade

In June I went to watch the Pride parade on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. The last two years I attended the parade I marched with my Big Tech employer (Apple in 2022, Google in 2018); this year I'm working for Little Tech so I watched the parade instead.

(I'm writing this post more than six months after the event so I'm going to go light on narrative and focus on the pictures I took, which lingered in my todo list for six months until I finally got around to posting them.)

I arrived on Market Street in the vicinity of Union Square just in time to see the parade open with Dykes on Bikes roar past; then they disappeared down the street leaving a long gap behind them before the next entry.

There were church ladies who were marching for gay rights.

There was a float named "Recyclops" but it wasn't obvious to me what it was representing.

MUNI carried a sign saying they "put the Trans in Transportation" and drove an electric battery-powered bus down the middle of Market Street, showing a rainbow on the display board.

One of the local biotech companies (I forget which one) carried a large-scale model of a strand of DNA built out of rainbow-colored balloons.

Boston Properties pulled a float with a model of Embarcadero Center (in its regular gray colors) and Salesforce Tower in rainbow colors.

Nancy Pelosi rode at the front of a group of left-leaning political leaders. (None of the pictures I took of her turned out great; this one makes me think of my mother, since Pelosi is blinking in the picture.)

California attorney general Rob Bonta showed up in the parade wearing a Rob Bonta t-shirt, in case we didn't immediately recognize him.

State senator Scott Wiener showed up on his own float.

Apple wore what looked like the the same logo from last year.

San Francisco Public Library carried a banner proclaiming themselves to be the "queerest library ever".

After watching the parade across from Grant Ave for a couple of hours, I began to get bored with the long gaps in the parade and started walking up the sidewalk on Market Street to increase the effective speed of the parade.

I was happy to see Bartmobile in the parade, dressed up in what looked like a rainbow-colored top hat.

Tesla drove a semi truck tractor in the in the parade.

Google marched near the end of the parade. (This picture also shows one of the hazards of the parade on Market Street: the grates covering the center lanes of traffic, which work great for driving across, and are fine for walking, but are a serious impediment for anyone wearing stilts or other elaborate footwear, which were not uncommon in the parade.)

The Coast Guard, at the very end of the parade, brought a float that actually floats. By the time I saw their boat I had walked all the way to the beginning of the parade at Spear St, four hours after it began.

I took a few more pictures at Pride at Photos on 2023-06-25.