SAN FRANCISCO — At 10:22 Sunday morning, on the corner of crowded Beale and Market streets, Tara Sorgentoni hopped off a rumbling motorcycle, raced over to her girlfriend and knelt with a small whiteboard containing her marriage proposal.

Friends shrieked as Jennifer Berg, a 43-year-old real estate agent, checked the box – yes – and held up her ring.

“I wasn’t going to do it for a couple more weeks,” said Sorgentoni, 37, a bartender. “But this is a monumental weekend. We can get married in any state we want.”

The San Francisco Pride and Celebration Parade is always big, with about a million observers lining downtown streets to watch an eye-catching array of floats that blend high theater with grass-roots advocacy. But this year, the event added even more buzz, observers said, because of last week’s Supreme Court vote allowing same-sex marriage across the country.

“I’m not big on crowds and don’t often come,” said Andy Ansen, 57, a retired lawyer who stood along two rows of observers lining the parade route. “But this year’s the year to come, the year to be here.”

MUCH TO CELEBRATE

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The 45th annual parade offered much to celebrate. Its grand marshal, Rick Welts, is the president of the Golden State Warriors, fresh off an NBA championship. Welts is also the highest-ranking openly gay executive in men’s professional sports. In addition, rights activists noted the Supreme Court’s other big decision, to uphold tax subsidies that are key to President Obama’s healthcare law.

“That affects a lot of LGBT people, perhaps more than marriage does, though marriage is very important in terms of the larger civil rights picture,” said Joey Cain, the president of a gay men’s group called Calamus and a board member of the San Francisco Pride organization.

Cain also noted that the Supreme Court did not necessarily settle the discussion with its historic vote. San Franciscans are especially sensitive to how circumstances can shift. California may have been the second state, after Massachusetts, to allow same-sex marriages, in 2008, but only months later they were halted by Proposition 8. They did not resume until 2013.

“The vote absolutely makes LGBT people say, ‘It looks like this is secure,’ but I have to say, the same thing happened with a woman’s right to control her own body as far as choice and yet it’s being eroded all over the United States,” he said. “We have to keep fighting.”

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Democrat, kicked off that city’s pride parade by presiding over a same-sex wedding in front of the historic Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, according to Newsday. Cuomo noted that it was his first time to officiate a wedding.

Human Rights Campaign staffer David Contreras Turley, 36, and UBS financial analyst Peter Thiede, 35, were married as a crowd cheered and the Beatles’ “Love Is All You Need” played, Newsday reported.

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The Stonewall Inn is the site of the 1969 riots that are seen as marking a turning point in the fight for gay rights.

‘THIS FEELS DIFFERENT’

“It’s hard to put feelings into words,” Turley told the paper. “Even though we had gay marriage in New York, this feels different. I feel different.”

New York legalized same-sex marriage in 2011, but this year’s pride parade was expected to draw one of the event’s largest-ever crowds, with as many as 2 million people ignoring rainy weather to pack the streets of Manhattan, organizers told CBS News.


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