SF City Hall to be lit up for Lesbian Visibility Week

by Heather Cassell

San Francisco City Hall will join a handful of cities around the world lighting up select buildings for Lesbian Visibility Week from April 24-30.

For the first time, according to Victor RuizCornejo in Mayor London Breed’s office, City Hall will be awash in red, orange, white, and shades of pink (the colors of the lesbian flag) Friday, April 28.

San Francisco joins London’s OVO Arena Wembley and Glasgow’s OVO Hydro Arena, which will also be lit up in the flag’s colors for the week recognizing lesbians.

The Bay Area Reporter reached out to Linda Riley, publisher of the U.K.-based lesbian magazine, Diva, and initiator of the modern Lesbian Visibility Week campaign, for comment and a list of other cities.

Riley did not respond by press time.

Lesbian Visibility Day is formally observed Wednesday, April 26.

“I think it’s ironic that a lot of people don’t know the colors of the lesbian flag,” said Frances “Franco” Stevens, a lesbian who is co-founder of The Curve Foundation. Stevens was the subject of the documentary, “Ahead of the Curve” ,” about the groundbreaking lesbian magazine she founded in San Francisco in 1990. The magazine is now a quarterly project of the foundation.

Steven’s wife, Jen Rainin, co-produced and co-

AdobeStock/Maxim directed the film with Rivkah Beth Medow.

The colors of the lesbian flag will light up San Francisco City Hall Friday, April 28, to mark a global event raising visibility about lesbians.

Stevens noted the prevalence of the rainbow flag and similar banners like the Progress flag, but not the lesbian flag or the visibility week. Additionally, she said lesbian visibility is getting lost as the world becomes more inclusive and the ways queer people identify become more diverse.

Throughout the film she asked, “Is the term ‘lesbian’ still relevant?” she told the B.A.R.

“Overwhelmingly, the response was, ‘Yes,’” Stevens said, adding that she will be out in front of San Francisco City Hall when it is lit up in the colors of the lesbian flag. “We are still here, and we need recognition.”

“We need to be recognized for our contributions to the community, to our culture, [and] to our city,” she said.

Lesbian Visibility Week was launched in 1990 by a group of Los Angeles lesbians to champion better representation for queer women within the LGBTQ community, reported Pink News. That same year, Curve hit newsstands across the country. Three years later, New York City lesbians launched the activist group the Lesbian Avengers , which started at the Dyke March at the 1993 LGBTQ March on Washington.

See page 2 >>