The Darker Side of Pride

A feathery drag queen spreads her wings during Pride weekend.

Content Warning: racist language, drug use, domestic violence.

Thursday

The days leading up to Pride weekend were like the drawback of a tidal wave (Pridal wave?). In preparation, we cut two industrial-sized buckets of limes, around three days’ worth. We stacked boxes on boxes of beer and seltzer in the walk-in, evacuating our supplies to higher ground. By Thursday night, we were ready. A coworker and I earned the privilege of clocking out early.

Coworker and I celebrated our hard work by splitting a joint and walking to Powerhouse. If you know what Powerhouse is, you know who goes and why. As we were locking up our bar, tourists approached and asked if we were closed. Yep. They asked us where to go. We told them where we were headed. “We tried that already,” said one guy. Yeah? What happened? 

“Too many immigrants,” said the same guy. 

The rest of us dropped our jaws. His friend was mortified. “Dude. Did you really just say that?”

Yes, he did. You just met your friend’s true self, and I had my San Francisco safety bubble burst. Go back to Texas, I thought. Looking back, I don’t know if they were tourists. Maybe these guys were just as San Franciscan as I. It’s easier to believe close-minded people don’t live here than entertain the thought of them as neighbors, but it’s unrealistic. The city only seems left-leaning anymore. My prejudices work the same way, only with different cartridges.

Friday

By midnight, Powerhouse was packed with shirtless gays eager to kick off their Pride festivities. Another coworker of ours happened to be working the door, so he stamped our wrists and in we squeezed. My partner found his way there soon after. By 2 AM we emerged sweaty and buzzed, my coworker heading home and my partner and I to a handsome stranger’s condo high above Market Street. 

Strapped and rippling figures on display, the glass and steel encasement of wealth rarely viewed from within, Carly Rae Jepsen music playing. All this exclusiveness sent me back into myself. I felt like I did as a kid when I went to birthday parties outside my trailer park. An imposition, the pity-invitee, there but for the grace of God. Younger me would’ve full-on Irish Goodbye’d. Instead I walked through the L-shaped condo daring to stay friendly, to create comfort where I found none. It felt like a win for that trailer park kid. 

The saying goes, “A lady always knows when it’s time to leave.” Cues that you should leave the party include the sound of birds, the sun coming up, and your own malaise. In my case, it was a post-refractory trapdoor into sleepiness aggravated by workday fatigue. The ways us gays keep a party going remind me of medical life support methods. They range from practical to extreme, from caffeine to nose drugs to injections. When they bust out the Trimix needles, it’s time to go. 

Saturday

Got home at 2 AM from a boring Pride weekend kickoff at the bar. The tsunami hadn’t risen to expectations, not yet. A friend of ours texted me about Afterglow, a big expensive party in San Francisco’s industrial neighborhood. He was working the event and had two spots on the guest list open—did we want them? Hell yes! Our friend saved us at least $80 each, coming in clutch for this Brokeass bitch (thank you, Ben!). Having fun as a gay man in San Francisco can be prohibitively expensive, and that’s especially true on Pride weekend. Us f-slurs are being more selective about when and where we go out.

But what to wear for Pride? Does it matter, I wondered as we prepared to pregame at a friend’s place off Haight Street? There’s a US-perpetrated genocide happening on the other side of the world and I’m stuffing a baggy in my pocket. The paradox of celebrating your living, breathing, queer body, while the dead decay in plain sight, is made of distance. Physical distance from victims, psychic distance from our ability to identify with them. I complained about the shabby tips I got on Friday night while the limbs of children rotted in the sun. Between house music sets, free tarot readings and sex on the dance floor, I worried, What are we doing? 

Pink Saturday in Dolores Park during Pride. Photo by Vanessa Gil

Sunday

Left Afterglow around 3:30 AM. The party went until six. I left with the friends we pregamed with. My partner elected to hang back with other acquaintances. I like blaming my tap-out-earlyism on our three-year age gap (I’m almost 34—mix the Metamucil and put me to bed). 

Got to work at 7 PM. Wave after wave of intoxicated queens had crashed and receded, crashed and receded. Tsunamis come in sets you know, and the first isn’t always the largest, to belabor the metaphor. I jumped into the swirling mass of leather, trash, neoprene and French fries and helped wherever I could. On top of all that, a strange, terrible smell was emanating from behind the bar.

Drunk 1 kept harassing Drunk 2 and my boss had to separate them. Drunk 1 then challenged a woman to a fist fight, getting him ejected from the bar. Arguments were starting around me like fires. Someone kissed someone they shouldn’t have. One guy wants to open his relationship; his boyfriend does not. In the meantime my bartenders were burning out and that God-awful stench was only getting stronger. 

A dark turn

Of all the full moon behavior I saw on Pride weekend, this will probably end up being the most unforgettable. The couple arguing about their monogamy had a lot to drink since I last saw them. One guy had backed his boyfriend into the corner of an area we call the gazebo. Boyfriend pushed his screaming partner away and the latter came back swinging. The poor dude just looked away as he took hit after hit. My boss and a security guard had to pull his raging boyfriend off of him.

I saw the whole thing. It happened three feet from me. Seeing it up close like that took me back to being twenty-two, when the cops arrested my first boyfriend. I had to remind myself that I’m almost thirty-four years old, that it’ll never happen to me again. I was still calming down when we were closing the bar, and when I saw the guy who’d taken his licks, I instinctively reached for him. 

Been there, I said. I’ve been there, and if you’re there right now, I’m talking to you too. This is the worst part. You deserve better, and you will get better. Take care of yourself. 

I couldn’t sniff out the source of the smell without retching. Something must’ve crawled into someplace hard to reach and died. Something had to be done. Cleaners traced the odor to a gap between the bartop and the wall, where a rat lay dead and decomposing.