Happy Pride!

This weekend is Pride! What will you do?

My Pride weekend will be jam packed. I can't wait to participate in the trans march on Friday. I'm really looking forward to seeing "Dyke Delights" on Saturday as part of the Frameline film festival. Afterwards I am going to take to the streets in the Mission and the Castro as I join other women in the Dyke March. My Saturday will be capped off with a good time at Pink Saturday on Castro Street. Sunday of course will be the Pride parade. My girlfriend Carmel and I still need a battle plan for where we will view the Parade. This year will be the first in several years that I am not volunteering. I get to see the floats! My Pride experience will end with a romp through the Pride booths.

I am hoping for a good time. One thing I worry about is being surrounded by smokers. Market Street will be jam packed with people on the sidewalks. Imagine being pressed on all sides by people trying to get a peak at the hotties on the float coming by. You can't move anywhere. All of a sudden you are overcome by the smell of smoke. Someone in back of you is smoking and the breeze is carrying over to you. You have no choice but to endure the stench and the dangerous fumes. It is not an inconsequential thing to be exposed to secondhand smoke. There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke. Secondhand smoking takes 4,000 lives in California from lung cancer and heart disease alone. Unbelievable!

Events like Pride bring out our community in force. Unfortunately it brings out our addictions in force too. There will be a lot of smoking on the streets. The statistics are really amazing. In California, men in the LGBT community smoke about 50% more than all men. Women in our community smoke nearly three times as much as all women. Transgender members of our community smoke twice as much as all Californians. And most alarming of all - LGBT young adults 18-24 years old smoke over two and a half times as much as all young adults (43.7% vs. 16.6%). There will be a lot of people lighting up!

I hope that through the advocacy of groups like Butt Out that we can get the message to smokers that there is a different way to live. We also need to decrease the exposure of innocent bystanders to secondhand smoke. I'd like to go to a Pride celebration that is filled with nothing but blue skies, fresh air and half naked men and women. Here's to hoping.

Have a fantastic Pride!

Stay in Touch!

Keep track of the work Butt Out is doing by going to our website (www.butt-out.org/), friending us on Facebook (butt-outsanfrancisco) or by connecting with us on Twitter (twitter.com/buttoutsf).Butt Out is a project of Breathe California, funded by the San Francisco Tobacco Free Project, which works to get tobacco money out of LGBT community organizations in San Francisco. We also educate the public about the hazards of smoking and about smoking cessation.