Ronald Chase | Parade / 1972

all the lovely faces

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ronald Chase (director) Parade / 1972

 

Director Ronald Chase recounts the rise of the San Francisco Gay Pride Parades, noting that the first such parade, held one year after the Stonewall Riots of 1970 was a Folsom Street event organized by the rock group Black Sabbath as a promotional event for number of then emergent rock bands.

     The first “official” gay parade, organized with permits by the city, was in 1972, with sparse turnout (“only two blocks of well-wishers turned out to watch the beginning of the parade”), but the excitement was “electric,” and a larger crowd collected at City Hall.

     Chase’s film of that first official San Francisco parade—a document thought to be lost for 50 years before it was rediscovered—represents it as being closer to what Europeans have long comprehended as a parade and what New Yorkers once described as the annual Easter Parade, a walk about of individuals dressed up for the occasion walking in pairs or small groups down the avenue.

     There are very few floats or large gatherings of groups, no bands. Here, as Chase makes clear in his focus on individual interviews, were individuals displaying themselves publicly as being gay or in some cases just gathering to disdain what they witnessed. One commentator describes the participates as “dirty and filthy”; another rather incoherently argues, “I have a brother who is homosexual and I wouldn’t have anything to do with him. I think they should have a city of their own. Like you know, the Alpine, what they were talking about.”

      Some, who may themselves be gay, haven’t quite liberated themselves enough to perceive the true benefits of such a parade: “I’ve already liberated myself a long time ago, how I feel about me, and I don’t relate to signs and posters, and things that I see that people carry because I’m liberated and why should I relate to that? But if that can bring about a change for someone else that’s good.” Another presumably gay man claims to be far more serious-minded than having time to participate in such parades: “It kind of disappointed me to see all these made up and phony people like pretending that they were just having fun. But it’s not like that, it’s a lot of seriousness about homosexuals.” And another cannot comprehend the elements of satire, camp, and exaggeration: “It’s sad that the only many forms…the gay men want to adopt is to kind of dress up… It is the worst of the female forms. …I think it’s a real desire that they want to be prostitutes.”

   Still others represent the endless saws of the “live and let live approach” as espoused by a priest (or a least a man dressed like one): “I don’t agree with them, of course, but I can see they believe in something, that’s up to them. But they shouldn’t interfere with my rights as an individual either.”; or what sounds like an older lady arguing, “Everybody has the right to live their own life, as long as they’re not hurting anyone else.”

    But for the most part, Chase lets these 1972 youths of so many lovely faces simply proclaim their own stories, their reasons for participating, and their explanation of their rights. But it is their exuberant and beautiful faces flashing across the document one by one that finally most convinces any viewer that these are indeed the righteous, and their parade is held, in part, simply to strut their beauty and youth as sexual beings.

    Albert Bessan’s 1977 coverage in several cities of the Gay Pride Parades is a far larger event, released as Gay USA, by this time many hundreds and even thousands of individuals joining in, with flags, dancing cotillions, bands, floats, and large rainbow flags snaking their way through city streets. And in Bressan’s celebratory documentation we can only breathe in a sigh of relief for how seriously the country had finally come to assimilate LGBTQ issues. Although some of the same concerns are expressed in Bressan’s and his colleagues’ interviews, things had begun to radically change, and some of the kinds of naïve comments Chase records seemed simply absurd in this larger-than-life transformation of the parades which themselves were a result of nationally reported homophobic events.

     Yet, for all that, there is something in this early 1972 parade when gay individuals came out—knowing that they might the be arrested and sentenced to up to 10 years in jail—more to proclaim and to celebrate their own existence than the general cause. This film makes my old eyes well up with tears. This was us, me and Howard, only two years after having become a couple, of 25 years of age, there in spirit if not in the flesh. We, our generation, were beautiful dreamers and we knew it. We represented then a future that today exists but is now slowly being whittled away.

 

Los Angeles, August 13, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).