Mission Local is publishing a daily campaign dispatch for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: Aaron Peskin. Read earlier dispatches here.
“Stephen, I know you used to cut hair,” says Sunny Angulo, chief of staff for Aaron Peskin. “Can you trim this?” Angulo is adding long streamers to the side of a flatbed truck. They are, at the moment, a little too long. They flow along the pavement like a glitter train.
“Do you have scissors?” asks Stephen Torres, candidate for the Board of Supervisors in District 9, and sometimes a Peskin campaign volunteer. Angulo looks around. Sighs.
The float has to join the 2024 San Francisco Pride Parade (theme: “Beacon of Love”) in a little over an hour. Behind Angulo, someone is taping up an enormous drawing of Coit Tower. On the pavement nearby, more campaign staffers and volunteers are frantically blowing up balloons. Everything and everyone is surrounded by buckets upon buckets of slightly wilted flowers.
There is no election campaigning allowed at Pride, so every candidate marching (and most of them are) has temporarily rebranded as a cult of personality instead of someone who explicitly wants your vote. To that end, every mention of the word “Mayor” on Peskin’s campaign signage has been covered up with something. The iron-on Pride T-shirts the team made earlier this week just have a stencil image of Peskin’s face with a rainbow beard.
A few blocks away, past long rows of corporate floats (Playstation, Starbucks, Amazon with a truck they’ve modified to read “Glamazon”), the subculture contingents (various leather groups, the very sweaty-looking NorCal Furries), the community groups and the nonprofits, sits the only Pride float belonging to a candidate who is allowed to use the word “mayor:” London Breed.
Breed’s float, a party bus shaped like a cable car, is draped with a bulbous, glittery fog bank of mylar balloons and streamers. The front bumper is fitted with a massive, laser-cut stencil of San Francisco City Hall with a ghostly image of a rainbow cowboy hat peeking from behind the dome like an approaching storm front. The effect is one part monster truck, one part Beyonce’s Renaissance tour. It looks incredible.
All the other major candidates are here, too. Mark Farrell has also secured a cable car party bus, which someone is expertly covering with orange balloons and a rainbow banner that reads “Mark Farrell.” Ahsha Safai has a green Jeep with rainbow streamers and a bubble gun. Daniel Lurie is accompanied on foot by a crew of marchers holding signs that read “Daniel Curious?” in rainbow letters.
Breed’s float joins the march with Diana Ross singing “I’m Coming Out” cranked up on the sound system. The marchers have been joined with a man in a panda costume, which is wearing a Mayor London Breed T-shirt.
Back at the Peskin float, the anxiety is lifting. The fringe is trimmed. The balloons are now blown up and fashioned into a slightly droopy, but still pert, rainbow arch.
The buckets of flowers turn out to be day-old bouquets from the San Francisco Flower Market, in gratitude for Peskin’s work in helping the market stay open over the years. Staffers pass out bouquets to marchers by the armful, until everyone has the air of a slightly sweaty pageant queen. This creates a new challenge: What to do with all the 5-gallon buckets that the flowers came in.
“This is chaos,” says Lee Hepner, former Peskin aide, current campaign volunteer. “But this is kind of our thing. We always have the least resources and the least money, and then we pull it together at the last minute.”
“Eight minutes!” someone yells. “Eight minutes!”
“The suspense is killing me,” moans one of the volunteers.
Peskin mingles with the crowd, shaking hands and hugging people. Instead of rainbow garb or a T-shirt with his own face on it, he’s opted for a breezy shirt covered in line drawings of Bay Area iconography, like redwoods and Golden Gate Bridges.
“This woman got married at the I-Hotel!” he says, introducing one marcher.
“We lived there,” says the man with her, trying to clear things up.
“And then you got evicted,” Peskin continues. “The sheriff, Richard Hongisto, came in with an axe, and he knocked the door down.”
The march is starting. The truck rolls out and Stephen Torres and a group of supporters take out plastic letters that spell out “Stephen” and pull into perfect formation behind it.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Jeffrey Kwong, current president of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club and a former Peskin aide, swoops into the march, wearing a white Peskin crop top, short shorts, and a neon pink fanny pack. He’s handing out giant cardboard letters — two A’s, an R, an O, and an N. The letter-holders mill around in front of the truck as the march moves down Market Street, confused.
“It’s supposed to spell “Aaron!” Kwong shouts, handing off a purple “N.”
“Wait, there are two A’s?” someone says, frantically.
The marchers spread out with their enormous bouquets, handing out flowers to people along the parade route, who reach out their hands and, when chosen, scream with delight as if they’ve just won some kind of lottery.
Kwong hops back onto the truck and begins to hand more bouquets out to the marchers, dumping water out of the empty buckets as he goes. The truck bed is covered in puddles and flower stems. It seems like there will never be an end to the bouquets.
A few blocks down Market, the sound system sputters to life, blasting “Levitating” by Dua Lipa, before segueing into “Azz Everywhere” by Big Freedia. Kwong rejoins Peskin at the front of the truck. The two are now marching with a very flexible person in a spandex unitard who starts to do high kicks. Then Peskin starts to do high kicks. His extension is quite good.
If you are going to San Francisco……
be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.