This Saturday evening I asked a buddy of mine — who teaches creative arts locally and I’m always looking for an excuse for him to bring his camera somewhere to come into the city with me. He agreed when I suggested to head into the city to catch the new 7×7 City of Awe art installation and see City Hall lit up for the weekend.

Welllll…. Things weren’t quite as I expected. City Hall was lit in dark orange, light orange, white, pink, and dark pink instead of the classic rainbow. Dyke March colors ruled the roost tonight, as it turned out.

I didn’t check or know there was a City Hall Lighting Schedule page. Doh! The 7×7 wasn’t rainbow either, even though ABC7 News implied it would be this weekend. As I was working out how I’d photograph and figure out this new configuration, I caught a conversation behind us — two people convinced they could see the Ferry Building from where we were standing. I about laughed. There’s no seeing the Ferry Building from City Hall, not with a few dozen buildings in between. Turned out the horizontal lights we’d both been puzzling over were coming from the Ferry Building, shooting down Market Street and visible from City Hall nine blocks away. Wow.

Sunday morning was the Pride Parade. This wasn’t my first time out in the new Aerostich, but its clean-ish, pressed look still puts a smile on my face — it’s nice to be tack-sharp for Pride. I couldn’t have asked for better weather — 68 degres, sunny, light winds for the whole day. I took the GS — the Speed Triple stayed in the garage, even though it’s the sexier bike, by far. The GS has cavernous saddlebags, and a day spent wandering the festival means somewhere to stash the Aerostich suit, gloves, and helmet. One year I’ll finally yield to the Dykes on Bikes helmet truck with my gear instead of hauling it myself. Promise. I’m just not there yet.

A local riding buddy suggested we meet early, and we were actually on the road by 8 a.m. — which happens just about never for me on Pride Sunday. It made all the difference. We didn’t have to squeeze between giant floats frantically trying to find the staging area. The streets were empty. An easy cruise down Mission, a left at Spear, and onto Market without a single hiccup once through registration. With the bike parked and time on my side, I had plenty of time to explore the parade staging area and be social with people. Yes, Felecia, in future years I’ll be doing an 8 a.m. departure.

The staging is where the day actually got interesting. There was a younger guy near me who’d recently found Homoto and was riding with a few of the members to get to know the club. He wasn’t even a member yet, just along for the ride as an associate. Contrasting, I joined back in 2011, so next to him I’m something of an old salt. On his other side was a woman riding her fiftieth Pride parade. Fiftieth. Three of us in a row: him brand new, her about as seasoned as it gets, me somewhere (lost) in the middle.

He was nervous in the way only a first-timer is — nervous about potential target fixation, what if the bike does this, what if that happens. At first I razzed him a little bit, but once it was clear that was the wrong approach, I shared about my own first Pride parade — that people are here to celebrate with him. This is the moment he gets to ride in a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people on national television. As scary as that sounds, it’s just like a day at the Motorcycle Safety Foundation course. I told him all he was doing was riding down Market Street at eight miles an hour, maybe twelve if the parade decided to move quickly. All he had to do was feather his clutch. Watching him, the nerves and the excitement all tangled together, did something to me. Not nostalgia, exactly. More like getting to feel it again secondhand, on someone else’s first time. That shared moment made me smile. Thank you.

As awesome as Pride is in the moment, none of that erases what’s happening nationally, though. Pride is as important today as it was in the Stonewall days. Now trans people are getting it from both directions, local and federal, in ways that feel more coordinated than they used to. I didn’t understand what it meant to belong to an underserved community until I became part of one. I don’t fully understand the trans experience and I don’t have to. I know trans people deserve to be treated with respect, kindness and extended the same rights as anyone else on this earth.

Turning the corner onto 8th Street where the parade ends, I got to thinking that the building we were riding toward is the same one where Gavin Newsom started marrying same-sex couples back in February 2004 — no court order, no ballot measure. He decided that queer couples had the same rights as heterosexual ones under that equal protection under the law thing. Thousands of people got married there before the state shut it down about a month later. Marriage equality in this country didn’t start in a courtroom. It started in that building, because the mayor at the time decided to do the right thing first and let everyone else catch up.

I still wanted to see City Hall in rainbow colors. So, on Sunday night, I took BART into the city instead of driving. With a ballot measure on the way — a 0.05% sales tax increase to fund public transit — I wanted to do my part, and parking in a city transitioning from Pride to America 250 didn’t sound like a great idea anyway. In the past few years I’ve been noticing how well San Francisco is bouncing back from the pandemic. It was great to be in the city two nights running. The last couple of years SF has turned a corner. New mayor, regional economic recovery, different energy — Daniel Lurie seems to actually want this to work, and his walking the streets and meeting with residents seems to be paying off. BART running clean, on time, and with 10-car trains on a Pride Sunday didn’t hurt either.

Sunday night, City Hall was finally rainbow. 7×7 was still doing whatever color it wanted to be doing — not rainbow, same as Saturday — but City Hall got there.

Today’s lesson: Youth keeps you young. Today it looked like a guy white-knuckling a parade route at eight miles an hour in the beginning then grinning so hard I could see it through his face shield at the end. Thank you!

Happy Pride, y’all!