Photos by Seth Temple Andrews
Our call for collaborators for the SF Pride parade brought together a group of burlesque queens, academics, sex workers, dancers, performance artists, students, friends, environmental activists, and anyone else who wanted to join us. In all, 120 people signed up. We needed a director to wrangle and direct our cast. So we consulted with artist/poet Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who suggested we hire his La Pocha Nostra co-director, Saúl García-López aka La Saula. Saúl was a masterful and creative director who took the work seriously. The parade shoot became a fruitful collaboration between our people and La Pocha Nostra troupe—overseen by Guillermo. Becka Shertzer, of Brazen Nectar Catering, had a lot of friends in the food biz and arranged for thousands of dollars’ worth of donated food and drinks to be available for our whole team. Among many others, Amy’s gave us a few weeks’ worth of frozen burritos and pizzas, Pepples Donut Farm sent dozens of divine vegan fresh donuts, and GT’s Kombucha gave us fifty cases of rainbow kombucha to hand out at the parade.
Our parade contingent was included as a Queer Cultural Center (QCC) performance in the annual International Queer Arts Festival. We asked that participants dress in the colors and themes of Water. The Center for Sex and Culture was our nonprofit umbrella sponsor, so Carol Queen, Robert Lawrence, and the CSC librarians, looking fabulous, marched along with us carrying their banner.
We broke into affinity groups: the green gnomes led by Kaytea Petro, the sexecologists wearing white lab coats with the word sexecologist spray-painted across the back, and the Pollination Podpushers wearing punk rock–style lingerie. Our favorite eco-burlesque queen, Lady Monster, was costumed as a sexy Earth. Puppeteers danced inside a forty-foot-long steelhead salmon puppet crafted by puppet master Heidi Cremer. Hannah Honeyheart Reiter marched in her belly dancer best. An eco-core drum squad, the Traveling Ills, called out Water-themed chants. Our contingent marched holding ecosexy Water-themed protest-style signs
On the morning of the big event, we hauled the Pollination Pod to the designated staging spot at the corner of Main and Market Streets. Beth outfitted the pod with four boat oars so that it could be human powered and pushed down the street. The Pollination Pod would be our sparkling, campy, Water drop effigy. The parade was way behind schedule, so,our press agent Kate Fritz serenaded us with bluegrass music. Daniel Nicoletta (who took the Harvey Milk photo that’s on the U.S. postage stamp) took great photos of our contingent. Our neighborhood shaman, Jorge Molina, performed a water ritual. Right before it was time to march, Guillermo, performed our new, co-written, streamlined, more poetic Ecosex Manifesto 2.0, which we felt helped counter the corporate commercialization of the Pride Parade.
Two of Beth’s students energetically led us down Market Street, carrying our fifteen-foot banner that read “Here Come the Ecosexuals!” We followed as the ecosexual pride flag bearers, with our flag poles inserted into crotch-level, black leather strap-on holsters. Flanking us were Paul Corbit Brown (the environmentalist interviewed in Goodbye Gauley Mountain) and Amanda Starbuck (an environmental activist who has been a leader within groups like Greenpeace.). We gave them a big wooden letter E to carry. Guillermo came next, escorted by two sexy Phantom Mariachis, played by his wife, Balitronica, and friend Jadelynn Stahl in zentai suits, sequined sombreros, and very high heels. Zen Cohen followed as an H2O police officer, interrogating people if they had wasted water. The Pollination Pod was in the center, and then came the sexecologists dancing with water-filled condoms and the giant salmon puppet and gnomes.
We flowed like water along the seemingly never-ending parade route. A million people watched this San Francisco Pride Parade, which was our largest performance audience to date.
Click here to see lots more info about this production, the cast, crew, and our generous sponsors.
Photos by Priscilla Bertucci
Photos by Daniel Nicoletta