This is it folks. We're wrapping up this series on all the famous pre-Pride fags who passed as 'perpetual bachelors' back in the days before AIDS and parades. There are of course a few historical homos we skipped over—like Sir John Gielgud (a classically trained British theatre actor who Mom hadn't really heard of before Arthur anyway),
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We know. You're tired. Your head hurts and you have some existential malaise to beat the band.  Half the people we know in SF make it an annual tradition to schedule the Monday after Pride as a vacation day from work, but here in the sweet sweet flesh and culture mines of The Sword, we are hard at work pulling together our shameful documentation from this past (all together now) Big! Gay! Pride! weekend in San Francisco, New York (where it was stormy!), Chicago, Paris and elsewhere. We're starting off with some pictures taken personally for us by SF photographer and Flickr legend Darwin Bell of the festivities in our favorite Left Coast city....read more

For the second year in a row, gay rag Genre has published their "Best Bars in America" article and left San Francisco off the list.*  While we are humble enough to admit that our hometown may not have a host of trendy fag hotspots quite on par with New York or Los Angeles, we are neither blind nor retarded enough to believe that there aren't a handful of venues in SF that beat out, say, Joe's on Juniper in Atlanta or Bill's ("The gay Cheers of Lauderdale") in Fort Lauderdale. San Francisco has the highest percent gay population of any city in the country for fuck's sake, so ignoring the city's gay bars two years in a row would suggest that there's an editor at Genre who doesn't much care for the City by the Bay, or its nightlife, despite it being the spiritual center of the gay universe (we're looking at you Neal Boulton).
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In anticipation of this week, we've been collecting footage of Gay Prides past, and wouldn't you know, it wasn't always so tacky and sponsored by beer and vodka makers!  The first "pride" wasn't a parade, but the Christopher Street Gay Liberation March up 6th Avenue in New York in June of 1970, commemorating the one-year anniversary of Stonewall. Then other cities, including San Francisco, launched their own Freedom and Pride celebrations. After the jump, check out some Sword-curated clips of Gay Day '79 in San Francisco, an NYC Pride march and rally in the late 70s, Gay Pride in Chicago around the same period, some footage of Stonewall, and footage from that first march in NYC in 1970.  And yes, pervs, there are many shirtless men running around in them.


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Thirty-nine years ago this weekend, the NYPD fucked with the wrong bunch of fags and trannies, giving way to four decades of civil rights fights, the invention of circuit parties, a boon for balloon artists and flag dancers, a bonafide industry dedicated to the manufacture of tacky beads and rainbow-patterned swimwear, and an excuse for every lesbigaytranny on two legs to get drunk or high one extra weekend a year in the name of freedom. (Our apologies to the sober ones—this weekend must be especially difficult.) It's Mardi Gras without the showgirls (biological). It's here. We're queer. Where's our drink?...read more

The first round casting call for Rupaul's competitive tranny reality show is just about over. Voting ends on Friday, kids, so hurry up and vote so the country isn't stuck with the decidedly low-rent likes of Jessica Dimon and Empress Fontaine doing speed-eyeliner challenges and pulling off each others' wigs like they were on Flava of Love. (Btw, how did these uninspired gals rack up all these votes? Are they huge on MySpace? What gives?) With that, we give you our arguments for why these other fine 'ladies' ought to be in the Top 5 instead. ...read more

Can we be frank for just a minute? We don't always like gay bars. Sure, we like drinking—and gays are champions at that—but the Stoli-soda-splasha-cran crowd wears thin after a decade or two and we find ourselves ever hungry for the new and different. Thankfully, our pals at Gay Bar Culture (based in LA but covering other cities too) are there to cut through the endless pairs of Dior sunglasses and clouds of Tom Ford for Men in search of huggable trannies and bars that would make us be proud to be gay again. It's about time...
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Okay, here's the deal. The Sword, in association with the San Francisco Visitor's Bureau, is happy to announce a contest for the filthiest fags out there (or whoever reads this site on a regular basis and wants to come to San Francisco during the filthiest weekend of the year). Grand prize is an all-expenses-paid trip for 2 to Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco, the weekend of September 26th, 2008.  The deal includes airfare, hotel accommodations, meals, an SF CityPass giving you free access to public transit and museums, complimentary massages, and VIP passes to Folsom Street Fair on Sunday, September 28th. All you'll have to do to enter is answer a few questions that test your porn knowledge and your daily reading of the Sword. ...read more

Along with the Pride Rally (which, though we might enjoy seeing Madame, sounds like a snore), Folsom Street East marks the kickoff of Pride Week in NYC. Though it may not be as large or as famous as the Folsom Street Fair in SF, it's bound to be just as Dirty with a capital D (okay, maybe not). There used to be an actual leather scene in Manhattan, and there used to be a bunch of dirty-ass bars and sex clubs around the Meat Packing District, before all of New Jersey showed up and it became the new SoHo, or midtown, or something. Anyway, we'll stop dating ourselves. The event is now held on West 28th Street between 10th & 11th, 2PM to 8PM on Sunday, June 22.
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No offense to Baltimore, Denver, Providence, Fort Lauderdale or Pittsburgh, who are also ringing in the gay year this weekend, but we *really* want to see some shots from the Nebraska Pride celebrations. We promise we won't make fun of them. It's simply that Flickr and the official Nebraska Pride website are sorely lacking in past documentation of this event, and we yearn for more photographic evidence from this foreign land—including shots of Nebraska's finest, corn-fed, strapping blond lads, preferably with their shirts off and their chests glistening in the prairie sun.
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