"Friends, congratulations on the 40th Annual San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration and Parade – the largest gathering of LGBT people and allies in the nation. The video will be shown on Sunday at Pride’s Main Stage and can be viewed here. A transcript of the Speaker’s remarks is below. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi recorded remarks for San Francisco’s 40th Pride Celebration and Parade, which takes place this weekend.
"It's not rational for me to expect that the next generation will face their lives in the same way that I did.Contact: Brendan Daly/Nadeam Elshami/Drew Hammill, 20 "They don't have firsthand connection to that original struggle," Ellis said. We created that sense of specialness among ourselves, and that is the price of progress, losing that sense of specialness."Īlthough Ellis resents the trend, he has accepted that he will have to explain to younger generations why he feels uncomfortable with the rise of young straight people attending Pride. "For some of us, we feel like we’re losing that specialness that we have as gay people," Pennington said. It's just part of progress, he said, and it’s what older LGBTQ activists fought for. He said he is happy to see more straight people showing up at Pride events, even if they're there only to have a good time. Greg Pennington, curator for the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, has resigned himself to the fact that younger generations will never know the trials older LGBTQ members had to go through to get where they are today – and that they may not feel the need to take Gay Pride as seriously politically as the community once did. "What they want is the freedom without the struggle." "These young people are not concerned about the issues that continue to impact the (LGBTQ) community that much," Jolivette said. Patrick's Day or Cinco de Mayo, has been taken over by people who want an excuse to drink and party, displacing the LGBTQ community from a festival meant to celebrate it. Going to Gay Pride, he said, has become a "cool thing" to attend rather than a place to uplift marginalized voices and to acknowledge the community's struggle to achieve progress. More: White nationalists plan to protest Pride event in Tennessee cityĪndrew Jolivette, a San Francisco native and American Indian studies professor at San Francisco State University, has a name for what he views as the commercialization of gay culture – he calls it "Gay Inc." He said he stopped going to Pride parades, upset by what he sees as the false perception that the LGTBQ community has made enough progress to stop resisting. More: Twitter CEO slammed for Chick-fil-A tweet during Pride Month On the other hand, some worry this acceptance could fall into complacency, dulling the importance of the movement, given the issues facing the community, and cloaking the history of resistance that helped achieve that acceptance in the first place. On the one hand, previous generations of LGBTQ activists fought for this acceptance, for a world in which being gay or lesbian was a non-issue. This acceptance has become something of a double-edged sword. For many young people, being gay is cool, not condemned. Those wins are one of the reasons behind the influx of straight partygoers. Last year in San Francisco, more than 1 million people took part, while in New York, attendance numbered more than 40,000. Pride celebrations swelled into huge affairs in many major cities globally. In the 1990s and 2000s, the LGBTQ movement began to grow, slowly winning legal victories. Gay Liberation marches became Gay Pride parades, and the events became more mainstream. In the 1980s, gay protest culture began to evolve. Back then, they were called "Gay Liberation" marches and were controversial and radical.
The first parades began in 1970 to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York. Groups joining Pride events from outside the gay community have been a point of tension and debate within the gay and lesbian community, especially as the number of corporate sponsors joining the parades grows each year.