Pride in San Francisco

It's Pride Week in San Francisco and I am glad I was there to capture even just a figment of it. San Francisco is, to me, like New York City, but just a tad more hip and artsy. Hip as in fashionable, stylish, funky and phat according to the urban dictionary. Phat and  I didn't mean to say fuckin phat like how I described my laughing Buddha. Phat in the urban dictionary means cool and fun but not obese. San Francisco is fuckin phat, indeed!

Artsy like pretentiously artistic! It's the culture of being young and gay.  Gay as in lighthearted and carefree not just being male and hosexual. At the Justin Herman Plaza, office workers eat their sushi burrito while a juggler tries to catch everybody's attention at a square where a fountain used to feature water an art form. That was before the drought. Even then, the atmosphere in the Justin Herman Plaza is gay which is not just being male and homosexual. 

Justin Herman was not the significant other of Harvey Milk as I thought he would be. Justin Herman which the San Francisco downtown landmark is named after was an urban development hero. Google couldn't  tell me if Herman Plaza was gay and homosexual but Harvey Milk was. 

Harvey Milk was neither the father of the Pride in San Francisco nor the mother firetrucker of the LGBT movement, Brenda Howard was. He did start his happy gay moments in Castro Street. The rainbow flag is probably among his brainchildren as a mother firetrucker. Milk encouraged Gilbert Baker, an Army draftee honorably discharged for being gay, to pursue his dream of being an artist, specifically sewing fabulous clothes that he could not afford. With Milk's "create and change" motto and influence, Gilbert Baker used his sewing skills to create the     iconic rainbow flag.

I deliberately avoided to go past two males wearing pink vests with "Because I am a Girl" logo. I thought they were selling hugs and the logo's message struck me as apologetic or some kind of an excuse. "Because I am a Girl" turns out to be a Plan International's movement to empower girls early on. Plan International is a non profit organization used to be known as Foster Parents Plan Internatonal. 

If it's not for solidarity, I wish people should just leave the rainbow flag alone. The Plan International's riding on LGBT issues to promote their advocacy against genital mutilation of girls in Africa is way out of hand considering that transgendered individuals like Bruce Caitlyn Jenner went under the knife for voluntary genital mutilation. And Pope Francis should shut up as well. How could he have known that same-sex couples do not make good parents?