The first SF Pride of the Trump 2.0 era is planning for a bigger potential threat vector from far-right hate actors, amidst policy attacks on the LGBTQ community and an emboldened sense of entitlement from those engaging in political violence.  

Not long after Facebook’s parent company Meta capitulated in a Trump-pleasing elimination of content moderation to allow more homophobia and transphobia to run rampant on their platforms, the Bay Area Reporter has an interesting mini-scoop. That paper reports that Meta is not expected to have a float or contingent in this year’s SF Pride Parade, as they have done in so many years past. Turns out they didn’t have one in 2024 either, for reasons that sound chilling.

"Most or all of our internal contacts, queer employees, are gone," SF Pride executive director Suzanne Ford told that outlet in late January. "We don't expect Meta to return to our celebration or parade in 2025."

Over the decades, we’re not the only ones who’ve noticed that SF Pride has evolved into more of a seemingly safe corporate exercise in commercial branding. Are those days over, as more corporations are sucking up to Donald Trump? That’s a possibility, but the more immediate issues for SF Pride, as KGO reports, are concerns that the weekend-long event will have to beef up its security as Trump’s rhetoric has riled up that hate-activist crowd, particularly with Trump’s anti-trans onslaught.

"I expect people are going to be emboldened and we are going to encounter more threats this year," Ford (who is trans) told KGO. "We are going to take out our security plans and make sure there aren't some things we need to tighten up a bit and also we're going to look at increased costs because we will have to be looking at increased security at these events."

Ford cited that last year’s overall budget was $3.2 million, and $635,000 of that was spent on security. She has reason to believe that this year may require beefed-up security.

"I've done several interviews in the past weeks and the comments are really running badly against us, even in the Bay Area," she explained to KGO.

There hasn’t really been a security issue at SF Pride since some fights and an apparent bear spray incident in 2022. Though there were a few shooting incidents about a decade ago.

It may not be an accident that just four days ago, SFPD updated their Pride Safety Tips page. That’s a legacy web page that’s been used for years, but was updated very recently, though its language is still very boilerplate.

"There will be a significant police presence during Pride activities, with both uniformed and plainclothes officers on duty to monitor public events," that page says, with standard mentions that there will be metal detectors, and that bags are discouraged.

But here’s one interesting quote from that page, considering that the Dyke March is in limbo, and Pink Saturday hasn’t happened in years.

“We want to remind the public that while the Castro District is open for business, there is no organized event taking place Saturday in the Castro District,” SFPD says on their site. “There will be no street closures.”

That seems a distinct attempt to discourage any informal Dyke March. Last year there was a pretty small, informal Dyke March that drew an estimated 300 people. The Bay Area Reporter also notes that some relatively new emerging leadership has been having a series of Zoom town hall meetings lately, but there have been no formal announcements on any organized Dyke March for 2025.

Though the SF Trans March website says that event is on for 2025, despite that community’s haters being pretty emboldened at the moment.

Related: A Brief History of Pride Weekend In San Francisco [SFist]

Image: @SFMTA_Muni via Twitter