Pierre has taken off somewhere, and while Fiaz can’t face the repeated questioning were he to march with his South Asian friends in Trikone—“Why didn’t you bring your partner? Are you still with that French professor? Why aren’t you getting married?”—he’s determined to at least watch the parade.

The theme for the year is “United by Pride, Bound for Equality.” Kicking off the parade are the usual Dykes on Bikes. The crowd goes delirious as dyke couples blast down Market Street on motorbikes. Today, in addition to their usual black leather or blue denim, some are attired in whites and pinks, wedding dresses straddling the gleam of their bikes, veils snapping behind them in the wind; others are suited and gowned; and yet others ride as everyday brides holding Just Married signs in their newlywed hands.

This is Seema’s first time attending Pride in a decade. She’d grown blasé about it, limiting herself to the Dyke March, held the evening before on Pride weekend; for the last several years, with Bill, she’s not even been aware when Pride came around. She feels a little like an imposter today: Does she even deserve to be here? She claps her hands to her ears against the deafening din, but the euphoria shocking the air is irresistible, the crowds larger and more exuberant than she’s experienced in the past. Even Fiaz, mournful a minute ago, joins in, bouncing up and down, dragging her with him, easily overcoming her token protest.

“Any desi dykes on the bikes?” She strains to get a good view through the thronging crowd. “Any dressed like a desi bride?”

“I can’t see any—” Fiaz scrambles up a lamppost base. “Anyway, it’ll only be the boys dressed as brides, not the dykes. You’ll see them on the Trikone float, dolled up in sarees and ghagra-cholis.”

Next are the bicyclists, the AIDS Life Cycle riders, and then an outpouring of color: a surge of rainbow balloons flooding the street, as if to wash it of any lingering staidness, any straightness, and carried in by it, a swarm of multicolored anemones and jellyfish, tendrils ballooned and tethered to beautiful men and women gyrating in skimpy underwear. Bare flesh flashes, and thongs and bikinis and star-spangled breasts bob and jiggle, amid twirling streams of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. The very light shimmies, shimmers.

“My eyes are getting drunk,” Fiaz says.

The Pride theme float that follows is a giant wedding cake, and behind it are the various agencies and individuals instrumental in overturning Prop 22, all met with lusty thank-yous and applause. Signs of Vote No On Prop 8 are also being toted—Proposition 8 being the Right’s redoing of the overturned Proposition 22, a constitutional amendment to force a ban on same-sex marriage that it successfully added to the ballot for the upcoming November election. But the crowd doesn’t let that diminish its enthusiasm. Mayor Newsom, White and straight and well coiffed, cruises by in an open-topped jeep in an open-collared white shirt, accompanied by his fiancée, and receives a homecoming hero’s welcome. Seema had considered Newsom’s defiance of Prop 22 a self-serving political stunt four years ago, but who is she to still argue that, in the face of this positive outcome?