The 29th annual Santa Cruz PRIDE March took place on Sunday, June 1st, to kick off a month of Pride and Celebration.

Traditionally an angry, rowdy march of defiance and resistance has turned into a warm, loving, celebrative parade/march of messages of peace and love and tolerance. This year and this Pride is no exception.

Don't get me wrong, i had lots of fun and thoroughly enjoyed myself at both the march and the festival at San Lorenzo Park.

There were so many beautiful people with positively loving energies and a sea of faeries, who can complain?

Well, maybe when somebody was urging the crowd to vote more democrats into the office in the name of progressive legislature, i had issues with that, but other than that, PRIDE was beautifully manifested on Sunday.

Bettina Aptheker, Chair and Professor of UCSC Women's Studies Department, gave a courageously honest and out-spoken speech on the necessity on the part of the LGBTI community to not forget that America is still under a military coup. Aptheker urged the crowd to focus on the 2004 Presidential Election to get Bush out of office, if not before it.

Meanwhile, i heard that there were people encouraging LGBTI and Queer identified people to become foster parents, which is simply unimaginable in other parts of the country even in this day and age, not to say twenty or thirty years ago.

I had a really good time at PRIDE this year. Although i was always one to criticise the lack of "community" in this supposed tolerant/liberal town, because realistically, only (upper)middle-class, white LGBTI and queer folks are really tolerated and/or accepted into the mainstream society of Santa Cruz.

This year though, i felt a good sense of community in the ways that a huge variety of people showed up at the Festival to participate, see, learn, and play with each other with open minds and arms.

This year's PRIDE also debut the appearance of GENDER FUNK COLLECTIVE. The Gender Funk Collective for the first time in history joined Santa Cruz Trans in the march down Pacific Avenue.

Gender Funk is a new non-profit, social change organization that seeks to deconstruct the many socio-political inequalities that have over time been normalized in mainstream society to become acceptable simply due to their presistent presence and continual practices, such as classism, racism, ageism, hetero-normativity, assimilationist politics, economic globalization, environmental exploitation, etc.

Gender Funk is a consensus-based, open collective that wishes to accomplish the deconstruction of the socio-political inequalities mentioned above through the means of education, direct action, and more.

For more information on Gender Funk, write us at genderfunk (at) riseup.net