San Francisco Visit-Gay Pride

Visited the great city of San Francisco for a week. While I was there, I took part in the Gay Pride Parade and Festival. It is fabulous being gay in San Francisco. The amazing thing to me is that being gay isn't really any big deal. I remember this time last year when I also was in San Francisco for Gay Pride a tour bus driver nonchalantly ask if my friend and I were going to the Gay Pride parade the next day. He said it as if he were asking if we were going to the ball game or any other function that anyone would attend. There are gay people all over, and for the most part, it is just part of the culture that is San Francisco. Gay couples hold hands with no reservations in San Francisco. And the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade and Festivities that follow are out of this world. They are part of the city itself, not just something set aside for "those people." The parade itself lasts about 2 hours and it is broadcast on the local KRON TV station (Philadelphia's equivalent of WPVI Channel 6 or NBC 10, not the local city cable company). Dignitaries from all over San Francisco participate. Being gay in San Francisco seems to be nirvana.
However, in the Monday (June 27, 2005) edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, Louis Freedberg reminded readers that "Sunday's Gay Pride parade in San Francisco is the bright side of the tolerance and acceptance of diverse lifestyles and people that have made the Bay Area, and Northern California, famous. There is a far darkerside-one of intolerance, prejudice and, at times, extreme violence." Mr. Freedberg reminded readers of the trial now going on in Hayward County, in which 3 men are being retried for the 2002 murder of a 17-year-old transgendered teen Gwen Araujo. Mr. Freedberg states, "The trial shames the Bay Area's tradition of tolerance-and challenges us to respond to stamp out hate and intolerance where it occurs."
Intolerance SUCKS! No matter what kind of intolerance we are speaking of, race, religion, sexual identity, or anything else. Why is it that people just cannot accept differences among others? It doesn't mean you have to like the differences, but if it is not directly effecting you, what difference does it make how different someone else is? We should all be striving to stamp out intolerance wherever it occurs, as Mr. Freedberg reminds us.