This weekend is the 35th Pride Celebration in San Francisco, a weekend-long event to celebrate LGBT acceptance and, well, pride. On Saturday, we went and checked out the fair in the Civic Center/City Hall lawn, with all the usual fair vendors and tons of vendors such as a Travelocity booth pitching gay-friendly vacations and the like; not to mention getting to hear members of the SF Opera perform parts of Figaro on the center stage! We went to dinner at Chow’s on Market and Church, and while taking F-Market to get there from my place, we saw such a diverse set of people on the street and on the street car. People of all ages, sizes, shapes and sexual orientations, fitting in and being accepted. At Chow’s, I stood in line for the bathroom. The line was two people deep (a very gay man behind a questionably lesbian woman), and as I waited, the person who exited the bathroom while we were enqueue was most definitely a cross-dresser. Oh, and the food was good, too.
The parade itself was great, we took a location around 5th and Market and managed to push our way to near the gate. All sorts of floats of support from all venues of live, including the (gay and straight contingents of) SFPD and SFFD, a couple of our gay city council members, and Gavin Newsom doing loops of Market on a bike (bizare). Equality and acceptance were the topic de jour. After the parade we went back to the Civic Center area (after getting burritos at Taqueria Can Cun), only to be met with a mess of people enjoying the festival and fair.