MARCHING TOWARD PRIDE
Marching Toward Pride is a series of six large, double-sided comics posters that were installed in the bus stops along San Francisco’s main thoroughfare Market Street in December of 2020 as part of the 50th Anniversary of the city’s Pride celebrations. They illustrate six moments of SF LGBTQ history from 1955 to 1970 leading up to, and including, the first Pride. Each are monochromatically colored to represent one of the six colors of Gilbert Baker’s original rainbow flag.
Stonewall and Pride were not the beginning of modern American LGBTQ history, but rather rose out of a rich legacy of queer culture and resistance that was particularly profound in San Francisco. The project seeks to put SF Pride in a broader context and display that history in an accessible and engaging way.
I’ve lived in San Francisco for 25 years now, and I’m still madly in love with this city and its remarkable spirit, history, beauty, and cultural legacy. This feels like a way to give back, at least a little, for the community, inspiration, and joy I’ve gotten over the years. I want the people walking down Market Street or taking the bus to better understand and appreciate our city’s remarkable queer history, and to honor the fierce and fabulous pioneers who made our freedoms possible.
This series was commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art on Market Street project. My research for these stories was hampered by Covid, but I was able to do my work online with the help of the invaluable GLBT Historical Society and other resources. I was also in contact with the historians Susan Stryker, Gayle Rubin, and Isaac Fellman, as well as community activists like Seth Eisen, Katie Gilmartin, and Race Bannon, and finally contemporaries to the events such as Tamara Ching and Mike Caffee. I’m deeply indebted and grateful to all of these people and institutions, along with many more. Despite all of this help, guidance, and fact-checking, however, I’m sure that I’ve made mistakes and those are entirely my responsibility.
I also want to thank my designer Sonia Harris, who made sure these posters look as good as they possibly can. I owe a debt of gratitude to Craig Corpora at the SF Arts Commission, who helped shepherd this project. Thanks as well to Christian Walters for assisting me with this webpage and my website overall, and to my mother Peg Miller for her help with editing. And finally, as always, a huge “thank you” to my husband Christopher Nash, without whose constant love and support, this would have been impossible.
Here are some other general resources that I used while creating this series (I talk more specifically about sources for each of the individual posters in their respective sections). They are wonderful places to begin an exploration of this history:
Making Gay History: The Podcast – an excellent collection of interviews that Eric Marcus conducted with an astonishing number of LGBTQ pioneers
Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area – an engaging overview of LGBTQ history in the SF Bay Area with loads of historical images, by Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk
Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 – a thorough look at LGBTQ SF history, complete with transcriptions of Boyd’s interviews with some of its key players, by Nan Alamilla Boyd
I hope you all enjoy this poster series! I worked very hard on it and am thrilled to have the opportunity to share my passion for LGBTQ San Francisco history with a broader public. I’d like to create archival prints from these posters, so if you’re interested in purchasing one, please write me at justinrobinsonhall@gmail.com. I’d also love to expand these posters out into full chapters and create an entire graphic novel out of this material. Stay tuned!
Justin Hall
