In a world rife with toxic displays of hypermasculinity, what we really need is a parade celebrating the high divorce rates between biological men and women.
SF is unquestionably the gay mecca of the world — a metropolitan at the nexus of queer political revolutions, cultural influence, and historical firsts. The City By the Bay has been home to more than one gayborhood, with The Castro now synonymous with queerness (and Harvey Milk). San Francisco, in tandem with New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, hosted the nation’s first-ever Gay Liberation Prides in the 1970s; these early iterations of queer resistance would later become modern-day Gay Pride Parades, with San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade routinely the nation’s largest or second-largest.
San Francisco Straight Parade
A Straight Parade in San Francisco for heterosexuals people attracted to the opposite sex. A peaceful celebration of love between Man and Woman. pic.twitter.com/kh8hFaqWpB
— Darren Stallcup For Congress 🇺🇸 唐人街牛仔 保衛長者 零元競選 (@darren_stallcup) November 25, 2025
Suffice it to say that San Francisco and queerness, gayness go hand in hand and, more often than not, exist in the same sentence. So you can imagine our surprise when we learned a Straight Pride Parade is scheduled to run down Market Street next year.
“San Francisco Straight Parade,” reads a nauseatingly bland post on X by Darren Stallcup, a Republican candidate vying for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat in 2026, announcing the heterosexual promenade.
Per Stallcup, the event will be a parade solely for those who honor opposite-sex partnerships — “a peaceful celebration of love between Man and Woman,” the post continues.
The event details remain gauzy; a startime of 11 a.m. somewhere along Market Street and a scheduled date of April 16th of 2026 are the only concrete publicly shared details; Stallcup writes in the replies to his post that those interested in more details can reach out to him personally at StallcupForCongress@Gmail.Com; it’s at this moment when we realized Stallcup was in desperate need of (and perhaps still needs) a copywriter to teach him the merits of capitalization.
Mind you, Stallcup’s attempt at straight-washing a cornerstone happening of publicly recognized queer culture is nothing new. Straight Pride Parades have been documented in some way, shape, or form since the 1980s, existing as more of reactionary events than celebratory gatherings. These displays of heterosexuality jubilation, all of which exist inside a world organized around cisgender heteronormativity, experienced a (small) resurgence in the late 1990s, before, like a creature pulled from a Stephen King novel, (mostly) disappearing for over 25 years; Trumpism and this wave of neo-conservatism has seen an uptick in Straight Pride Parades organized in major cities, particularly those along the West Coast — again, a clear sign of their reactionary foundations.
These parades are routinely met with the playing of the world’s smallest violin. A Seattle Straight Pride Parade in 2015 went viral for its sheer bravado, but ultimately failed to materialize on march day. A 2019 event organized in Boston by Super Happy Fun America, a US right-wing political organization with proven ties to white nationalism, famously drew more counter-protesters than marchers.
Stallcup’s attempt to galvanize a perpetually limp piece of reactionary politics in the age of rage bait won’t go over well. History has a comical way of repeating itself. Should his Straight Pride Parade get actual sneakers on the ground, we’d wager they’ll be met with drag queens roosted on kitten heels.
