“You cut social services for AIDS patients and the homeless,” some voice screams at Newsom, though nobody seems to pay it any attention.

Bringing up the rear are newly married gay and lesbian couples walking hand in hand, almost sedately, the very picture of normalcy, escorting the plaintiff couples in the case against Prop 22, whom Seema has been waiting for. They ride in roofless cars decorated as wedding getaway vehicles trailing cans and streamers, waving and blowing kisses at the cheering crowd. Seema searches among them, nudging through the throng.

But no Del and Phyllis, no lavender and turquoise of their wedding suits, no wheelchair and companion. The morning’s exhilaration ebbs as swiftly as it had swollen.

“Fiaz, I want to go,” she says. “I’m getting a headache.”

Fiaz is still hanging off the lamppost, watching intently a young man in a rainbow leotard, who’d clambered over the security fence and is running to each car, kissing each seated couple in turn and posing for selfies with them, evading the parade monitors chasing after him.

Fiaz has not heard her, and she drags him down from his perch by his jacket sleeve. “Stop drooling at the boy. He’s too young for you.”

“I was not drooling.” Fiaz straightens his jacket with exaggerated dignity. “Not that there’s anything wrong with drooling. If Pierre only limits himself to that—”

“Why do you stay with Pierre, then, if it bothers you so much?”

“He says it’s only sex.” Fiaz shrugs. “The way we’re fighting, we may not be staying together much longer.”

The light turns off in Fiaz’s eyes, and Seema feels sorry for him.

“Ten years together,” he says. “Even my mother is now asking when Pierre and I are getting married.”

“You’re lucky,” Seema says. “At least she’s accepting.”

Seema has met Fiaz’s mother during the times she has come to stay with him and Pierre: a smart, always stylish, pixie-like woman in slim tops and loose printed pants, a long narrow shawl usually wrapped around her shoulder-length bob, never missing her namaz or the thirty fasts of Ramadan.

“Next she’ll want grandkids.” Fiaz laughs hollowly. “Not sure, though, how much she’d approve if she found out how many dicks her favorite son-in-law sucks in his free time. You know, the only thing I asked of Pierre? Not today. Today let’s march together. I want to feel pride.”

Fiaz still wishes to stick around for the Trikone float, and she consents. They both watch the plodding parade with a joyless, even jaundiced eye: elected officeholders and political aspirants, various community organizations, and commercial concerns like banks and nightclubs and radio stations that have muscled in on Pride. The ethnic contingents bring up the distant tail, and more than an hour and a half later, the Trikone float comes by, a small garden of giant metallic red-pink flowers and parrot-green slotted leaves. There’s only space for a few people on the float, and it’s occupied by three men and two women, all dressed traditionally, the men in kurta-pajamas, the women in salwar-kameezes.