San Francisco brims with history — and not just in the Castro, its world-famous gayborhood, or the Tenderloin, where trans women rioted for their rights at Compton’s Cafeteria in 1966. Since at least the 1930s, Chinatown has nurtured its own queer community, something the Chinese Culture Center and the art space Edge on the Square hope to highlight with their Chinatown Pride celebration on May 24. A centerpiece of Chinatown Pride is a procession that’s more than a parade. It’s a chance to learn about Chinatown’s queer landmarks through a drag-ified walking tour with music and dancing. Kalypso and Kiki Krunch — the 2024 and ’23 winners of the GLBTQ+ Asian Pacific Alliance drag pageant — will lead the procession to landmarks such as the Grant Street nightlife district, home in the 1930s and ’40s to underground queer speakeasies and tourist-y Chinese American nightclubs that featured “female impersonation” shows. “We want to honor that legacy and also think about what it means to be visible and also hidden,” says Erika Pallasigue, art and public programs manager at Edge on the Square. “When we’re out here in a procession, saying, ‘We are here, we’re visible,’ there’s also acknowledgement that not everybody is out, and it doesn’t mean that you have to be out to also be proud, queer and Asian.”

Though many queer people feel the need to leave their immigrant communities in order to come out, Chinatown Pride seeks to include those who’ve been queer in Chinatown all along, as well as queer AAPI folks from all over the Bay Area. One group of queer elders will grace Chinatown Pride with a taiko performance. Meanwhile, others’ stories inspired stops along the procession, such as a woman who once worked as a phone operator at the Chinese Telephone Exchange, where secret intimacies between women blossomed in the 1940s.

“Chinatown has always been queer,” says Hoi Leung, deputy director and curator of the Chinese Culture Center. “It has always existed in liminal spaces, and that has always been a safe space for counterculture to happen.”

In Leung’s view, that queerness extends to even Chinatown’s architecture itself. After the 1906 earthquake, city officials conspired to displace the local Chinese population so that white residents could take over Chinatown’s prime real estate. Amid the negotiations, Chinese American businessmen decided to rebuild the neighborhood with campy, stereotypical architectural flourishes so that Chinatown could become a tourist attraction.

To the Chinatown Pride organizers, that in itself is almost a form of drag. “[Chinatown] actually dressed up, right?” Leung says. “That’s where you get all the lanterns and all the quote-unquote ‘Chinese-style’ facades.”

The Chinatown Pride procession will land at the Portsmouth Square Pedestrian Bridge, which drag artists, dancers and the Rice Rockettes will use as a runway as they lip sync and deliver gravity-defying dance moves. The evening will also feature interactive art activities, a silent disco and more.

“We have this notion that the Chinese community has always been conservative in terms of their perspective with the LGBT community,” reflects Kiki Krunch, one of the drag artists leading the Pride procession. “But knowing that [queerness] existed here even during the ’30s, ’40s and ’60s reaffirms that being authentic to yourself really helps to shape the larger social movement.”