What’s become a Pride Weekend tradition returned with the annual tagging of the former Stud, but this weekend’s taggery spready to a half-dozen adjacent buildings, and four cars were thoroughly vandalized.
Warning: The images in this post contain a little profanity here and there.
It almost seemed poetic justice that the former home of now-shuttered The Stud, once the oldest continuously operating LGBTQ bar in San Francisco, now gets ruthlessly tagged every year on Pride Weekend. After all, the building’s new owner painted over the murals by queer artists in 2020, so maybe all’s fair in love and painting over other people’s shit?
But this year’s Pride Weekend graffiti proceedings took an unfair and much darker turn. KGO reports that vandals also trashed four cars this year while spraypainting the graffiti, demolishing windshields and leaving giant cratered dents on the roofs of the cars. Security footage from one of the cars confirms that this destruction occurred simultaneous to the graffiti session.
"This one was worse [than previous years],” nearby business owner Frank Skubal told KGO. “The tagging was comparable but the fact that they demolished several cars' windshields and hoods, what you have is completely undriveable."
And it’s pretty clear the tagging is recent, with timely messages like “Avenge Banko,” “Fuck DeSantis,” and “Kill Elon Musk.”
Skubal notes that he’s pretty astounded at the lax law enforcement response, given the magnitude of damage and how long this activity was allowed to go on Saturday night.
"The bigger concern also is how could they get away with this? This didn't happen in five minutes," he told KGO.
KGO also adds that one individual whose car was vandalized “lives in San Francisco but was planning to drive his car home to Canada in the next week or two. Now he can't because his car is undrivable due to the condition it's in.”
This annual unsanctioned graffiti riot spread much further to adjacent buildings than it did in previous years, and some jokers climbed fire escapes to take their tagging to a second level.
The violent turn of the annual Pride Weekend tagging of The Stud presents this yearly act of civil disobedience in a much different light. And it sure can’t be a welcome development for whatever Redfin realtor is running this open house down the alley.
Images: Joe Kukura, SFist
