More than 50 members of congregations Sha’ar Zahav, Beth Sholom, Sherith Israel and the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Relations Council hammed it up for the cheering crowd of an estimated 700,000.
“Oy vey! I’m gay. What’s my mother going to say?” they chanted. The congregants sang and hoofed a few Jewish folk dances to the klezmer beat of Gay Iz Mir, whose gay members played atop the float.
While many of the Jewish marchers were gay, heterosexual individuals and family members also attended to support gays in their battle for civil rights.
The 27-year-old parade has become a San Francisco tradition, begun to commemorate the 1969 riot that followed a police raid on a New York gay bar called Stonewall. The parade crowns a week-long celebration of the vitality of gay life in San Francisco and gays’ struggle for social and political equality.
Rabbi Jane Litman, the newly hired spiritual leader of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, which has a predominantly gay membership, marched with her husband and two children. Litman comes from another gay-oriented synagogue in Los Angeles, where her kids, now aged 6 and 10, participated in many a gay pride parade.
“Gay is good,” proclaimed Litman’s 6-year-old, Asher, his hair tangled in a plastic tiara full of Stars of David. He scampered from marcher to marcher doling out the colorful stars, which clung like benevolent burs to hats, clothing and ears.
Kenny Altman’s reasons for marching weren’t so simple.
“As an openly gay Conservative Jew, I want people to know that you don’t have to be Reform to go to a synagogue. Gay Conservative Jews are just as welcome at [the Conservative] Beth Sholom, even if that’s not universal to the Conservative movement.”
Altman is chair of Beth Sholom’s ritual committee, although, as a gay man, he cannot participate in one of the synagogue’s most important rituals — marriage.
“I have faith that by being active in my faith, that’s the only way to affect change,” he said.
The parade was a first for Josef and Lisa Grosch, also of Beth Sholom. The couple recently moved here from Chicago, where groups like S.F.’s Dyke Shabbos “would not go over so well,” she said of the Midwestern city’s conservativism.
“You couldn’t even advertise it,” she said of such a gay Jewish event. But, she added, a few “liberal-minded” congregations welcome Chicago’s gay and lesbian Jews.
No one was excluded from San Francisco’s biggest and brashest party of the year. Marchers waved signs — “The clitoris. Know it. Use it.” — and wiggled bare butts, breasts and penises in the afternoon wind.
Filipino men cross-dressed in native Filipina costume and honored Imelda Marcos, their country’s Evita Peron, with a Philippine version of the hula. Lesbian line dancers indulged in a swingin’ country two-step. And every gay-minded political and social group from the mayor’s brigade to socialists and seniors maintained a float, streetcar or banner.
A beer brewer resurrected memories of the Budweiser Clydesdales with a live elephant that marched to promote the brewer’s new ale, named after the lumbering pachyderm.
In the Jewish contingent, women donned yarmulkes and men wore boxers depicting the Israeli flag. Others sported T-shirts with the slogan “One in every minyan,” and jewelry featuring the pink triangle, which symbolizes the gay rights movement. They waved, clapped and performed for the crowd.
Altman struck a hopeful note, speculating that one day gays and lesbians would not need to march for equality. After all, it was only about 30 years ago that women were barred from synagogue leadership, he said.
In the meantime, he added, the “numbers [of gay participants and supporters] aren’t as important as the fact that people see who we are.”