Pride Weekend Wrap-Up From In and Around SOMA

How was your pride weekend? I would say that it was nothing less than crazy for me. For the most part, I spent it right here in and around South of Market, as there really wasn’t much of a need to go anywhere else!

Tribute to Michael Jackson Outside the Ferry Building

It started Friday night with a Flash-dance Mob paying tribute to Michael Jackson, exactly one year after his death. About a hundred people (maybe more, throughout the evening) hung out on the pedestrian island near the Ferry Building while the flash-dance mob organizers provided some of MJ’s greatest hits to groove to.

Early on, they made a point to suggest that everyone in attendance talk to someone they didn’t know. Of course, I managed to met the most racist Hawaiian I’ve ever met, who proceeded to vent about a bunch of negative details of his evening. No worries though, we were there to celebrate the life of the King of Pop, so I didn’t let his negativity bring me down!

And then there’s Sunday. The 40th Annual Pride Parade went off, for the most part, without a hitch (aside from a fatal shooting in the Castro Saturday night).

As in previous years, the parade lasted for HOURS. I think that if they took all of the political figures who chose to march this year, and placed them on a single float, it would have been a more manageable 2 – 3 hour parade. Since San Francisco political figures like to be in the pride spotlight, they each opted to have an individual march, which made the parade last longer than 4 hours. It was a beautiful day, but 4+ hours in the sun = burnt foreheads and faces (as well as any number of other exposed body parts) everywhere.

Deborah Walker And Her Big Head.

I noticed a couple of our friendly, neighborhood District 6 Politicians in the parade. Theresa Sparks opted to ride along with Senator Mark Leno, while Deborah Walker and Jane Kim chose to go it alone with their own entourages. Props to Deborah for using a 4 foot long caricature of her head. In case anyone might have missed her, you could use the caricature for reference. In fact, my camera used the caricature for ‘facial recognition’ on the photo! (Who cares if everything else in the photo is slightly out of focus? Certainly not my camera!)

After the parade, we headed over to Civic Center for the mob scene that was the Pride Party. Thousands of people crowded into Civic Center Plaza to wait for (what felt like hours in the hot, sweaty crowd) to hear a handful of Backstreet Boy’s Greatest Hits and a short set by Andy Bell from Erasure.

If someone told me a decade ago that I would be living in San Francisco, hanging out at the Pride Party in Civic Center waiting for the Backstreet Boys to reunite before my eyes, I probably would have laughed in your face and walked away. I guess that’s what makes San Francisco so fun; you never know where you’ll find yourself on any given day.

Here are all the photos that I’ve compiled from this crazy weekend, starting with Friday night and going all the way to Sunday Evening. If you captured any great events in South of Market, or throughout the Pride Weekend itself, please feel free to shoot them our way and we’ll add them to the post here.