Hundreds gathered Sunday in Russian Hill for the sixth annual People’s March, a feisty street action that recaptures the militant, anti-corporate energy of the LGBTQ+ movement’s early days more than half a century ago.
Launched in 2020 by drag performers Juanita More! and Alex U. Inn as an alternative to the much larger San Francisco Pride, the march kicked off with a series of speeches at Washington and Polk streets. That intersection was the heart of the city’s gay neighborhood, Polk Gulch, when the first Pride march — then known as Gay Freedom Day — took place in June 1970, one year after the Stonewall Uprising.
This year’s march saw a dramatic shift in tone from combative to unifying. Gone were the broadsides against San Francisco Pride for being too large and too friendly to “pinkwashing” corporations, many of which have since pulled back their support for the LGBTQ+ community. Instead, nearly every voice called for solidarity.
As a further gesture toward reconciliation between the two organizations, the People’s March took place one week before Pride — not, as in years past, on the same day.
Speakers ranged from the politically powerful to the marginalized, including state Sen. Scott Wiener and a Latinx drag queen who defiantly revealed her status as an undocumented immigrant.
Advocates condemned both President Donald Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ executive orders and last week’s Supreme Court decision upholding Tennessee’s ban on certain forms of healthcare for transgender youth, seen as the latest salvo to erase trans and gender-nonconforming people from American public life.
The high court’s ruling “galvanizes us,” Inn said. “Let this decision be a spark, not an extinguisher.”
Noting that resistance to oppression has been in the country’s DNA since the Boston Tea Party, local trans activist Honey Mahogany said the march signaled that San Francisco won’t accept the president’s agenda. “We are what this country is made of,” she said. “We dumped that tea right into the bay, honey.”
Led by motorcycles carrying large Progress Pride flags, the demonstration headed down Polk Street toward a rally at Civic Center, joining a separate Juneteenth celebration. Since its founding in 2020, the People’s March has been an explicitly Black- and brown-led street action that echoes San Francisco Pride’s long-running “Resistance Contingent.” This year, they will explicitly complement each other, and more than 1,000 people are expected to join the group next weekend, according to Pride executive director Suzanne Ford.
“The contingent does not include any corporations or politicians,” Ford, a trans woman, added. “It exists to do what you do here today: Fight back.”
