It can be a scary time to feel and celebrate Pride these days. Much of the country froths with bizarre anti-queer hate campaigns, egged on by grandstanding conservative lawmakers racing to ban everything from gender-affirming care to drag shows.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco in the state capitol, has called it “an orchestrated national campaign to erase LGBTQ people from history and intimidate us back into the closet,” and it’s having a tangible effect.
The Human Rights Campaign, which has declared a state of emergency for all queer Americans, tells The Frisc that last year they recorded a spike in violence during Pride, with more than a quarter of “fatal violence” incidents happening in June and July. Recent UCLA research indicated that queer people are nine times more likely to be the target of violent hate crimes. About 9 percent of all violent crimes against queer Americans are hate crimes, compared with 4 percent for non-queer demographics.
It’s happening in California too. Just a week ago, Orange County supervisors banned Pride flags from public property, and right-wing extremists attacked a school board meeting in Glendale, 10 miles north of downtown LA.
Even here in San Francisco, the queer capital of America, the pressure is rising. “There’s no shortage of existential threats,” says Todd Colletti, owner of the Eagle, one of the city’s most redoubtable gay bars. “I don’t feel as eager to go out as I used to; I’m not sure if that’s a justified adaptation based on genuine threats, or just the way it seems to be after having my vision for the future stepped on so much,” he writes via email.
“In San Francisco, we often think we’re in a bubble of sanity, but that’s never really been true,” says Sister Kitty Catalyst, a 30-year veteran of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, noting that the threat of violence and state-sponsored persecution is never far from queer communities. (The Sisters just went through the wringer, invited to a Pride celebration before a Los Angeles Dodgers’ home game to honor their charitable work. The invite was rescinded after conservative backlash — and then sheepishly reinstated.)
With all that, it’s reasonable to wonder how San Francisco is organizing one of the biggest and most publicly visible Pride celebrations in the world. Given the city’s high-profile status in the culture wars, I wanted to have a sensitive but frank discussion about this point in history. But after many weeks of emails and calls to the Pride organizers, nobody was biting.
The organization did offer a statement on safety with rather vague language about “enhanced security measures” like bag checks, “zero tolerance” for harassment, and having “personnel on standby,” but it was the kind of thing you could say about any big event.
How to acknowledge the risk without potentially exacerbating it? ‘It’s important for Pride organizations to be sensitive to these questions and convey to the public that they have good reason to feel safe.’ — Council on Foreign Relations fellow Jacob Ware
Finally, a Pride rep explained the reticence: They don’t want to put that vibe out there, partly for fear that discussion of anti-terrorism measures might provoke ideation on the part of right-wing extremists, and partly for fear that by discussing such things even as hypotheticals, it contributes to an atmosphere of fear.
They also raised the point that being too specific about security can compromise those very measures — which, yes, is a very reasonable concern, and one we reported on last month in talking with Drag Story Hour organizers.
But as counterrorism researcher Jacob Ware points out, “It’s important for Pride organizations to be sensitive to these questions and convey to the public that they have good reason to feel safe.” Especially since, according to Ware, “there’s a racist assumption [in this country] that white nationalist groups are less likely to act.”
It can become a bind for safety officials and event organizers: How to acknowledge the risk without potentially exacerbating it?
With this argument in, I coaxed more comment out of SF Pride deputy director Chris Grafton, who acknowledges changes to security protocols this year, emphasizing that most are about “ease of use and accessibility than they are about making things ‘more secure.’”
Grafton does anticipate “some hate-filled counter-protesters holding signs, as there unfortunately are every year,” but believes that the danger of substantive harassment is not appreciably higher than in previous years.
He’s not the only one who thinks so, and it turns out there’s a surprising reason.
Testing the fences
In one sense, the size and prominence of San Francisco’s Pride celebrations risks making us a kind of white whale for troublemakers. Ironically, it may also insulate us from many of them.
No sprawling public gathering can be 100 percent guaranteed secure, but Pride wouldn’t fit the pattern of many modern extremist groups, says Sophie Bjork-James, a Vanderbilt University anthropologist specializing in far-right and white nationalism. “We are in a moment of experimentation by far-right groups,” she tells The Frisc, as white power movements transition from a purely digital movement into real-life action.
Attacking something as big as SF Pride, though, “would take a larger turnout” than many can muster, Bjork-James says, and groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front often prefer soft targets in smaller towns, like the aforementioned Glendale harassment.
Daryl Johnson, a consultant and former Department of Homeland Security analyst, warns that a “lone wolf” could target any place without regard for their own safety. However, he agrees that the gang-like intimidation of the sort directed at school boards and libraries in recent years is less likely to succeed at a big gathering like Pride.
“That scenario, of coming up to protest and just stirring up trouble, people probably will not travel that far” for that kind of losing confrontation, Johnson says. In 2017, when the group Patriot Prayer tried to rally in San Francisco, they ended up getting run out of town. It was a pretty pitiful display.
Ware concurs, but adds that police presence and responsiveness can be a big X factor. At the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, once the crowd saw that security was lacking, that was all it took to push many into violence — the perception that they’d get away with it.
SFPD spokesperson Adam Lobsinger said the police will be working overtime this weekend. Lobsinger acknowledged via email that “nationally, threats and intimidations [sic] focused directed at LGBTQ+ organizations and events have been on the rise,” but “there are no known credible threats to June’s Pride events or San Francisco.”
Whatever measures might be in place this year, the message is clear from every Pride-goer I spoke with for this story: Don’t expect a somber and cautious Pride. In other words, to hell with that. “Our communities are used to surviving while under attack,” Sister Kitty says, citing “the same old bigots” as no reason to tamp down festivities.
It’s important “to keep people safe but also wanting people to come out, because it’s very important to continue to claim public space for sexual diversity,” Bjork-James notes. And as SF Pride’s Grafton puts it, “Our local queer scene still has just enough punk rock stank on it that wannabe fascists don’t feel safe here.”
Adam Brinklow covers housing, development, and more for The Frisc.