Pride

Just got back from a fabulous morning with Rishi and Dana at the San Francisco Pride Parade. I was mostly motivated by a desire to see my friend Mike Wong play with the San Francisco Lesbian Gay Freedom Band, but the whole thing was a blast. My favorite floats were a Latino float topped with an Aztec pyramid, a Hawaiian hula dancers float, the Taiko drummers (I simply adore Taiko drummers), but most of all, the Barbary Coast Cloggers. These guys rocked. Fantastic dancing on top of a moving flat bed truck! The City Hall float won for heart strings, probably. I was very excited to recognize a couple from the Justly Married section of Ephemera's website--Marvin and Bill, apparently. It was nice to see the actual people I had blogged about back in New York, back in February.

Given the great dancing and music from all the other groups, Rishi and I were a bit disappointed with Trikone's quiet desi showing--very near the end, a few marchers holding a droopy banner and a man in a sari. "Yay, Desis!" we screamed, and then, Rishi, indignantly, "Where's the music?!" I suppose that might be a reflection of the South Asian community not yet being that comfortable coming out ("But. .But. . you're Indian!") but there's no way an ethnic group's mainstream parades should be more fabulous than its representatives in the Pride Parade. Maybe we'll pitch in next year, "gay for a day."