Because shelter-in-place orders are still, technically, only extended until May 3 in San Francisco, SF Pride has yet to make any moves to change or cancel the LGBTQ Pride celebrations here — even though Los Angeles has canceled their Pride, which happens just weeks before ours, and both Santa Cruz and Sonoma have canceled theirs as well.

This year's Pride parade and celebration are set to mark the 50th anniversary of the first Pride/gay liberation celebration in San Francisco in 1970 — which happened on the one-year anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in New York. And as of last week, SF Pride Executive Director Fred Lopez told the Bay Area Reporter that Pride was still moving forward for the weekend of June 27.

In a statement originally issued on Facebook on March, SF Pride's Celebration Committee said that "all options" were on the table, and "our staff and board continue to forge ahead, cautiously optimistic that taking sensible — if unprecedented — measures now will enable us to celebrate Pride 50 together as a community."

What those measures might look like for an event that has historically drawn around 1 million people — scheduled to happen just about seven weeks after the current shelter-in-place directive may (but likely won't fully) end — is hard to imagine.

SF Supervisor Rafael Mandelman tells the BAR, "Ultimately, public health will dictate whether and in what form this year's Pride celebration can occur," and he says it seems unlikely that Pride will come together "in its traditional form" this year.

It seems more than likely at this point, given that the U.S. won't have fully contained the coronavirus by summertime, that most large-scale events will face cancelation in SF and elsewhere.

But as of now, Outside Lands is also technically still moving forward for August, and both BottleRock in Napa and Coachella in Indio have postponed until October.

And while New York City is in the midst of a far more dramatic explosion of coronavirus cases and deaths, New York's Pride celebration is technically still on the books for the same weekend as San Francisco's. The organization that puts on the official NYC Pride, Heritage of Pride, last issued a statement on March 13 which only discussed its own work-from-home policy and "modified operations."

Photo: Thomas Hawk