In San Francisco, LGBTQ Pride is a Year-Round State of Mind

The 50th anniversary San Francisco Pride Celebration and Parade has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic but the spirit of this milestone event will still be celebrated, a time for acknowledging San Francisco’s LGBTQ heritage while celebrating all the fun and fabulous things that repeatedly make it one of the top cities in the world for gay travel.

San Francisco Travel, the city’s destination marketing organization, once created a campaign that said, “San Francisco’s gay neighborhood is called San Francisco.” To honor and celebrate the 50th anniversary of San Francisco Pride, they created a new video, acknowledging that, in this city, pride is a year-round state of mind.

What began on June 28, 1970 as “Gay Freedom Day” has become San Francisco Pride, the largest gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) event in North America.

Over the next five decades, this modest gathering evolved into San Francisco Pride, a globally famous annual parade and celebration that welcomes hundreds of thousands of participants and spectators from around the world the last weekend in June.

An online photography exhibition, “50 Years of Pride,” displays nearly 100 photographs to celebrate five decades of San Francisco Pride, the city’s most beloved public festival. It is presented by the GLBT Historical Society and the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries with the support of San Francisco Pride, beginning on May 15, 2020. The exhibition will ultimately be displayed on the ground floor and North Light Court of City Hall.

The pride of San Francisco’s LGBTQ community has a long history, beginning as early as the Gold Rush in 1849. It’s a big part of what the city is today – open, welcoming, inclusive, creative, colorful and caring.

Several icons of the gay world began in San Francisco. The rainbow flag was created here in 1978 by Gilbert Baker for San Francisco Pride. It has since become a symbol for the LGBTQ+ community around the world. The GLBT Historical Society has unveiled an online version of its exhibition “Performance, Protest and Politics: The Art of Gilbert Baker,” which opened at the GLBT Historical Society Museum on Nov. 1, 2019. The exhibition uses textiles, costumes, photographs and ephemera to paint a complex portrait of artist Gilbert Baker (1951–2017).

Travelers at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) can now arrive and depart in Terminal 1, the Harvey Milk Terminal. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected official in the history of California when he became a San Francisco Supervisor in 1977. He was assassinated in 1978. The SFO terminal was named for him in 2019.