Whoops, sorry we're so late getting this post up -- we lost our notes and tore up the house before resigning ourselves to the idea that somewhere, someone is going to find a notebook with "the lighter side of rape" scrawled across the first page. That comment refers to Give Piece of Ass a Chance, a new Bruce LaBruce short that preceeded Starrbooty. It's a speculative spoofing of the Patty Hearst abduction that asks the question, what if Patty'd been abducted by hilarious lesbians and subjected to comedic sexual assault? Ha ha ha ha ha ha! It's a recipe for wackiness!

As usual, BLB's short is like an episode of Murder, She Wrote: layers of mystery and meaning, requiring leaps of deduction and puzzlement in order to figure out just what the hell the whole thing is about in the first place, all for a result that's not terribly rewarding. All in all, an unwatchable waste of time. The jokes were legitimately funny, though, such as a violent feminist who uses a machete to trim her girlfriend's bush; and if you enjoy lesbian bondage porn, hip hip hooray.

Starrbooty has no such pretenses. It's a breezy exploitative crime-caper spoof, part 24 and part V.I.P., with RuPaul as a tough-talking secret agent and, of course, top model. It is with great gusto that the lady delivers implausible kung-fu, going undercover as a hooker to infiltrate a crime ring of organ harvesters and ... well, the plot doesn't matter quite so much as the pulpy banter, impressive drag-queen mugging to the camera, and cock. Lots of cock. Many of the cast members, y'see, are actually porn stars.

The Pride Parade is one of the best photo-ops of the year, isn't it? The yearly celebration gives us an opportunity to step back, examine ourselves, and then breathe with relief, "yup, still gay."

SFist photo friend Matt Cohen has some excellent snapshots on his Flickr stream of the festivities. After the jump: underwear, cheerleaders, balloons, and Carole Migden!

Or at least it's a start. It looks like the Friends of the Pink Triangle are already hard at work getting ready for tomorrow's event. It's that or alien pathfinders from the movie Signs are pointing the way to City Hall in preparation for attack from the motherships. Either way, you should get up there tomorrow to help kick off Pride Weekend. (Bring some water just in case.)

Hey, newsflash! Gay people vote!

Taking advantage of this breaking news, Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, will be addressing the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic club at their Sunday breakfast the day of the Pride parade.

On the bright side, that's great that national politicians are finally recognizing the power of the gay-friendly voting bloc! On the down side -- well, it's not like John Edwards is coming to speak. Everyone does really love Elizabeth Edwards, though, so it's cool.

Picture of the Edwardses from the John Edwards 2008 campaign

First, the bad news, then the good news -- Lez be Friends isn't very funny. It hurts to say, since the premise is so appealing: a fake cheesy sitcom, set in the days after Stonewall in 1969 Greenwich Village, starring a lesbian and her gay friends (including a clumsy drag queen and nosy landlord). Doesn't that sound neat? The folks who were around back then all have such interesting stories; and dropping those stories into a mainstream medium from which they'd previously been excluded is such a cool idea.

But the execution ... oh dear. The film is presented as two half-hour sitcom episodes, and the jokes seldom manage to rise above Yes Dear quality. One typical exchange: when a lesbian finds out that her naive gay friend has been slutting around, she asks, "what happened to my nice Jamie?" He whines, "I am nice." And she rejoins, "yeah, nice and easy!" The laugh track responds as though this was actually funny; and it feels uncomfortably like a sitcom that should've never been greenlit.

The most bewildering thing about the finished product is that it's supposed to have been done in the style of an old-fashioned, thirty-year-old TV show; but it feels completely modern. Everything about its vocabulary -- the framing of shots, the length of the scenes, the actors' blocking, the pace of the dialogue, the lighting and audio -- could not be more 2007 if they tried. Intercut with actual vintage commercials, the failed attempt at oldfashioneyness comes off as a hopeless, depressing anachronism, like a rapping grandma or the one 40-year-old at a Bright Eyes concert.

After the jump: the good news.

If the prospect of watching a gay pride parade on television thrills you, you'd better have cable -- because KRON, which has previously broadcast the parade over the air on channel 4, is this year bumping their coverage all the way up to Comcast's channel 99. KRON's broadcast license is up for renewal, see, and the chance of losing it over something unexpected during the parade is just too great. (You can read a highlarious lover's spat about it on our "contribute" page -- hey, folks, you know you can argue much more effectively in the SFist forums, right?)

The reason that the station can be put out of business for a single incident is because the FCC is charged with enforcing community standards. The airwaves belong to the public, and it's the government's job to make sure that broadcasters conform to socially accepted ideas about what's good and proper. But what could be more socially accepted in San Francisco than an unpredictable gay parade with a brief smattering of indecency? We ought to be complaining to the FCC that there isn't enough nudity on TV right now.

But KRON, our favorite scrappy underdog-station, doesn't have much wiggle room when it comes to license renewal. They've already been fined once -- a viewer complained when the station accidentally showed a brief glimpse of a dick during a segment about Puppetry of the Penis. (Why this delicate individual did not change the channel as soon as the subject of the broadcast was announced is unknown.) And some nutcases believe that swears and genitals have magic powers, like Medusa's head -- one glimpse, and you're polluted and impure. Somehow, those lunatics are in charge of the asylum these days; so until that changes -- which could actually happen soon -- that means the parade will have to be banished.

You can watch the parade live on channel 99 -- all your favorite KRON personalities will still be on hand to host the broadcast. You can also catch it online at kron4.com, and an edited version later that evening on channel 4.