A Walking Tour of the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade 2010

You meant to show up, but you were watching Argentina beat Mexico in the World Cup knock-out round. Or perhaps your kids took too long to get their stuff together and get in the car. Or you hate crowds and figured you would rather watch it on television tonight. So you didn't go to San Francisco's annual gay pride parade.

Well, here's a short video of what it was like:



And here's a guided tour of the people who walked through at least part of the umpteen-hours long parade.

A view of the crowd on Market Street between Fourth and Third streets.  Lotta people.

Gay marriage remains a hot topic. People also had signs tweaking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about fulfilling promises to end legal discrimination against gay and lesbian employees.

The Backstreet Boys were grand marshalls of the parade, but there are so many of the boy banders that they had to put them in two different convertibles:

The gay pride parade is always a place where young men seem to forget to wear their shirts and long pants. Perhaps because the colors clash with their angel/flower/flamingo costume. Who knows? Who's complaining, anyway?

I'm not sure what group he was marching with, but he took long pauses to allow people to take pictures of him in his underwear.

Perhaps this young man supports a vigorous U.S. space program, you thought? Then you read the other side of his sign, and you realized he was interested in exploring something completely different. And you just said, "Oh."

Really, I don't know.

The local art school pimped out its young students.

This float above, believe it or not, was put together by a local college. What it has to do with college, I don't know, unless it's a classics-only institution. Still.

One of the warmest receptions of any gay pride parade is always reserved for PFLAG, the Parents, Friends, Family of Lesbians and Gays.

I have marched in exactly two gay pride parades. In Chicago in 1997 or 1998, I marched with PFLAG, and it was a very emotional experience (partly because Chicago's parade goes through narrower streets with residential buildings along both sides, so the crowd is both thicker and higher). The second time, I marched with a now-defunct San Francisco group seeking equal immigration rights for gays and lesbians. The sucessor to that group is still around, and still marching (above).

(Above:) I don't know. I really don't know.

Gold's Gym often has the best-organized float and marchers. Certainly, matching their reason for existing, Gold's has some of the nicest-looking marchers.

They just kept coming. I couldn't do anything. I had to keep photographing ...

What's this? More people without shirts? How could this happen???

All in all, if you missed the parade, you'll live. I might not be a big fan of parades in general, but I take some small pleasure in knowing that some people in the crazy Right will be upset by this parade.

The Disappearing Gay Magazine Market

To be more specific, today's blog post is about the disappearing gay adult magazine market, though even some non-adult gay magazines are having a tough time of it (for example, The Advocate). From Matthew Rettenmund comes word that Men and Freshmen will cease publication (or will go to newsstand-only distribution as quarterly themed magazines [warning: that last link includes some NSFW images], which, as Rettenmund correctly points out, is pretty much death for a magazine anyway. Advertisers don't consider quarterly magazines to be magazines, and readers tend to forget about a magazine three months after the last issue.

Rettenmund, for you uninitiated, is a popular novelist and magazine editor. Before his current gig, he had served as an editor at Mavety magazines, which published a string of gay periodicals that were all abruptly shuttered earlier this year.

The same thing is true about Men and Freshmen that was true when I wrote it about the Mavety magazines. These magazines had nothing more to them than porn. For years, gay skin magazines have launched with the promise to be the "gay Playboy," but they never delivered. If they had non-sex-related material in them (travel articles or interviews), those very soon disappeared so they could devote more pages to what they assumed their readers were buying the magazine to get: erotic stories and nude photos. I've got nothing against either, but I do note that Playboy is still around -- bowed and challenged, yes, but still publishing with millions of readers -- while competitor Penthouse threw away its millions of readers when publisher Guccione ramped up the sex content in a last-ditch (futile) effort to save his publishing empire. The nudity and sexual content can be gotten easily and endlessly online, so at best it is an added spice to a print publication. The print publication needs to offer something that is much rarer online, which in my humble (and constantly repeated) opinion should be longform journalism, good writing, and good reader service. Playboy still does that. Winq more or less does that. Men and Freshmen don't/didn't.

One last note: For a great fictional look behind the scenes at a New York-based gay magazine, read Rettenmund's 1998 novel Blind Items, which features the editor of just such a magazine trying to juggle his job, a new love, and celebrity closets.

UPDATE 1/20/11: This report has been updated and expanded in my new digital magazine, Magma. Read it free online.

UPDATE 3/25/11: Mate and Winq magazines team up.