No Gay Pride Parade would be the same without DYKES ON BIKES (we first spotted them in SF in 1980)

Years ago …. actually decades, to be exact,  our very naive and very British future Editor landed in San Francisco chasing his Prince in Shining Armour, with whom he had hooked up for just one night in a seedy club back in London’s Earls City.  This night of passion led to a  ‘you must come and visit’ invite, which naturally no one thought would ever be taken up.

But low and behold, our intrepid Editor-To-Be was desperate to lose his ‘American virginity’, so it seemed appropriate that he take a Virgin Airlines Flight to the ‘city by the bay’.  To cut a long story short, the Prince already had a Princess stacked away in his tower on Market Street, but nevertheless, our Ed still fell in love but with city and it’s very welcoming queer community.

One Sunday in June the highlight of the day was the Gay Pride March the likes of which our Brit had never ever experienced before.  Literally the whole city had turned for this, and in a day which gve him queer sensory overload he stil remembers two parts in detail even now.

The first was that the Parade was started with the roar of over a hundred  motorbikes, mostly driven by leather-clad fierce looking women: this was Dykes on Bikes the sight of which he  will never forget and that still leads so many Gay Prides around the globe today.  If there was ever an exanple of ‘you cannot judge a book by its cover’ this was it , as chatting with them after they were not nearly as scarey as the looked.  Well at least soime of them.  Here they are years later in Sydney Australia 

https://queerguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/AQOasRj0cKcaDUbRHtRunWqS1J5i-ksyZEM8CPwnAkWZjNGY-GvsukNDUiAgJF-GBPe8JLbgvtNqmM4vIVtyfQ-JbZpiFgoByypUYc.mp4

The second item of that day that need explaining to the Brit was that there was small group of gay men proudly martching with a banner that said GAYS AGAINST SCRABBLE! and the whiole crowd roared  He was quick to discover it was a pointed dig at a group of aggressive lesbians who were usually ALWAYS AGAINST SOMETHING.