No Cops (or Mayor Breed) at SF Pride
#135
Welcome to Third Cultured, a newsletter covering all things queer and techno-politics from the perspective of Kyle Borland. My goal is to highlight all the ways today is different (and not so) from yesterday.
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This edition:
Opinion Essay
Links, Quotes & Things
Opinion Essay
Talk about getting more bang for your buck.
Who knew that when SF Pride told the SFPD that they couldn’t march in uniform in this year’s return of the Pride Parade – but they could participate in any other SFPD merchandise (like every other profession) – the cops would throw a hissy fit that would rope in their former PR rep-turned-temporary-supervisor, the firefighters, the sheriffs, and even Mayor London Breed? (It didn’t take long for folks to realize they were oinking about money, which they only get in uniform, not exclusion.)
On behalf of the vast majority of Queer people, thank you for voluntarily removing yourselves from an event you invited yourselves to in the first place.
2022 is going to be the best Pride yet!
For those who don’t live in San Francisco and/or are Cishet people here to learn about LGBTQ+ politics, let me provide a few prominent examples for why SFPD and the Queer community do not see eye-to-eye. (Especially when they nauseatingly try to rebrand themselves as “peace officers.” How about y’all stop killing people and then we’ll decide if we should call you anything but pigs?)
Not to get too into the weeds, but Pride is first and foremost a protest. The first Pride was an outright riot! Specifically, a protest against cops and their brutal, violent harassment against the LGBTQ+ community. SF’s Pride goes back 52 years, but the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria Riot in the Tenderloin happened four years before the first local Pride march and three years before the Stonewall Riots in New York City. Both were an eruption of anger and frustration at the police’s treatment of drag queens and trans people, particularly trans women of color. This is an American problem, but SFPD goes out of its way to stay at the top of Queer folks’ Burn Book.
In 2019, the last year SF Pride was in person, SFPD violently removed Queer activists at the Pride Parade for protesting the hypocritical inclusion of police at the anniversary of a clash with cops. It was this demonstration of police brutality, in addition to the George Floyd protests of 2020, that led SF Pride to ban uniformed police from future Pride parades.
Last week, SFPD killed two people in the Dogpatch neighborhood of the City, including the knife-wielding assailant and the unarmed victim! The California DOJ announced yesterday that it’ll review the fatal San Francisco police shooting given the “uncertainty” around the incident (aka looking into the age-old question, “why can’t cops control themselves from killing even when someone doesn’t have a weapon?!”)
Hell, they’re actively not doing their jobs to make DA Chesa Boudin’s life harder and his Republican-backed recall more likely to succeed.
As for Mayor Breed, she has her own track record of using the City’s LGBTQ+ community when it’s politically convenient or financially lucrative, but throwing us aside when the faintest breeze blows the other direction. She claimed last Friday that Pride was “her favorite event of the year” and then barely 72 hours later sided with cops over Queer people at an anti-police protest. Then again, we shouldn’t be surprised that a politician with a record like the one below would do any different.
For what happened in 2015, I’ll let the SF Examiner explain: “Mere days after Mayor London Breed revealed she took a potentially illegal $5,600 gift from disgraced former Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru, this column can report another person connected to Nuru’s FBI corruption investigation was directed to give a potentially illegal gift to the mayor. Nick Bovis, the owner of Lefty O’Doul’s restaurant who was arrested alongside Nuru for attempting to bribe an airport commissioner, was solely named on an invoice to pay for Breed’s San Francisco Pride Parade float in 2015, when she was on the Board of Supervisors. “
In the 2018 school board elections, Mayor Breed not only endorsed a transphobic candidate, she refused to withdraw her support once Josephine Zhao’s prejudice became public record.
Two weeks ago, when Mayor Breed appointed Matt Dorsey, a gay man who also happens to be the SFPD’s PR man, to replace Assemblymember Matt Haney as District 6 Supervisor instead of Honey Mahogany, Haney’s top aide. Honey would have been the first trans and first Black LGBTQ+ person elected to the SF Board of Supervisors who has intimate ties to the communities of District 6. Understandably, the community was overwhelmingly disappointed in Breed’s decision to prioritize factionalism (Mods vs Progs) over the clear choice of the D6’s constituents, which we will see come November when Honey annihilates the cop’s copywriter in the general election.
I am proud of SF Pride for taking this stance and thankful that they have held firm amongst the powerful’s temper tantrums. SFPD has earned all the scorn that is directed at them from SF’s Queer community. That is refutable. More than that, there is absolutely no reason that any straight person, regardless of their office or position, should believe their opinion about Pride should have any weight whatsoever on how our community organizes itself.
Pride is not for you. It never will be for you. It is a celebration of queerness in the face of adversity and harassment that more often that not comes directly from the government and the police. Look around the country at the 200+ anti-LGBTQ+ bills, the rise in hate-fueled violence, and the pedantic whines of our “allies.”
Queer people need to come together – free of cops, corporations, and politicians – more than ever before. We cannot loosen our grip on our spaces because that is where we keep and nurture our power. That’s why the state and its pigs are desperate to control those spaces, because then by extension they control us. I am so thankful for the organizers who threw their bodies in the way of the 2019 SF Pride Parade. It was the exact reminder we needed and the perfect test to weed out the snakes in the grass.
As always, thanks for reading, beautiful people.
Kyle (@kgborland)
Links, Quotes & Things
Anti-LGBTQ+ Laws and Violence in the US
A generation of LGBTQ advocates hopes the clock isn’t ticking backward (Washington Post)
Being Gay Was the Gravest Sin in Washington (The Atlantic)
My Queer Life Is Not Inappropriate, and Neither Are the Books That Reflect It (LitHub)
Right-wing extremist promises to “hunt” LGBTQ allies during Pride Month in shocking video (LGBTQ Nation)
Starbucks to pay travel costs for trans employees getting gender-affirming care (LGBTQ Nation)
State Farm pulls out of school book program after anti-LGBTQ extremists accuse them of grooming kids (LGBTQ Nation)
Baptists and Other Christians Being Hypocrites
Bombshell 400-page report finds Southern Baptist leaders routinely silenced sexual abuse survivors (Houston Chronicle)
Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, lied about secret database (Washington Post)
Southern Baptist leaders say they will release list of alleged sex abusers (Washington Post)
This Is the Southern Baptist Apocalypse (Christianity Today)
Comment: Christians – the disgusting, hypocritical sycophants who project their own sins onto other groups of people – lied, AGAIN?! This is my shocked face. -_-
Happy Pan Day! 5 common misconceptions about pansexuality (Stonewall)
Monkeypox is not a gay virus. Haven’t we been here before? (New Statesman)
It should go without saying that infectious diseases do not have sexual, racial or national preferences, and that no disease is a “gay” disease. A virus’s only preference is for bodies without prior immunity that will allow the infectious microbe to invade host cells and replicate. Sadly, what has emerged over the last few weeks is a narrative reminiscent of the early days of HIV in which a sexually transmitted virus was quickly used to stigmatize gay men, among whom the initial cluster of cases was found.
Same-sex couple feel 'safe' in Derbyshire after fleeing Ukraine (BBC)
The expensive and unscrupulous campaign to keep an anti-abortion Democrat in Congress (Popular Information)
The reinvention of a ‘real man’ (Washington Post)
“There has to be a line,” Substack’s Founders Dive Headfirst into the Culture Wars (Vanity Fair)