The Middle-Aged Guide to Pride

When you’re happily married and over the Dyke March, sometimes celebrating Pride looks like board-game nights and Trader Joe’s runs.

Illustration by Laura Bagnato

It’s the last weekend of June, and my wife, Lala, and I have slept in because it’s Saturday and that is our God-given right as lesbians with no kids. Today is the San Francisco Dyke March, and we’ve planned not to go. It’s okay if we skip it because we’re middle-aged lesbians, which seems incredibly hard to believe. Lala rocks a blue fauxhawk, and her clothes are either Assassin’s Creed- or Captain Marvel-themed. She spends her mad money on comic books and her free time painting D&D characters that she makes on a 3D printer. I have purple hair, and I’m in a yacht-rock band. I went dancing on a work night last week. How can we possibly be middle-aged?

But Lala was at the very first SF Dyke March, back in 1993, when it was a grassroots movement without a permit to shut down the streets. I’ve marched in so many of them I’ve lost count. I’ve ridden on the back of a Harley in the Dykes on Bikes opening contingent, gripping the waist of the girlfriend of an ex-girlfriend (naturally). I’ve been too drunk at the Lexington, too drunk in Dolores Park, and way too drunk on the BART ride home to Oakland.