Straight Pride 2023
Straight Pride supporter gives the Sieg Heil Nazi salute.
08.26.2023 ┃ Straight Pride Modesto drew the fewest people of our three years of coverage with a dozen people showing up for their eleven o’clock rally. For previous years’ coverage, read about Straight Pride 2022 and Straight Pride 2021.
While most of the twelve attendees held religious signs, some held explicitly hateful ones. Content warning applies here. Two attendees stand out in particular, both wearing hats, one with a sonnenrad (a Nazi symbol which today functions with similar meaning to a swastika) and one with a GDL symbol (Goyim Defense League, an anti-Semitic hate group). One of their signs reads “Jews are the Problem” with an old anti-Semitic caricature typically called “the happy merchant”. The other’s sign reads “follow your sisters” and shows a transphobic caricature committing suicide, an apparent reference to the statistically heightened risk of self-harm experienced by the Trans community. The “follow” sign may be a response to a somewhat common anti-Nazi display depicting Adolf Hitler’s suicide and reading “follow your leader”.
Police vehicles roll by the group every few minutes, stopping once to talk briefly. The surrounding businesses have been taped off and there are orange plastic barricades blocking connecting streets. Streamers mill around looking for stories paying particular attention to the two fascists and their platform. At one point, six or seven anti-fascist punks walked around hurling insults, but conflict didn’t seem to boil past this as far as we saw.
Fascists with hateful signs. Pink Knight Press.
The calmest, smallest, and most explicitly hateful Straight Pride we’ve covered. For previous years’ coverage, read about Straight Pride 2022 and Straight Pride 2021.
https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/goyim-defense-league
https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/happy-merchant
