More than a thousand people gathered on a San Francisco beach over the weekend to celebrate Burning Man, the desert arts festival that was cancelled this year because of coronavirus, San Francisco’s mayor announced, saying the “absolutely reckless” party had put people’s lives at risk.
Social media video of people dancing, some without wearing masks, and setting fires at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach on Saturday prompted widespread condemnation.
“You are putting our progress at risk,” San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, tweeted Sunday morning, announcing that the city was closing down the parking lots at one of the city’s most accessible beaches to prevent another Burning Man gathering.
Last night, over 1,000 people crowded on Ocean Beach to celebrate Burning Man. This was absolutely reckless & selfish. You are not celebrating. You are putting people's lives at risk. You are putting our progress at risk. No one is immune from spreading the virus.
— London Breed (@LondonBreed) September 6, 2020
San Francisco had seen only 86 coronavirus deaths, according to public health data, compared to a toll of nearly 14,000 deaths statewide.
The news that San Francisco’s mayor was reducing access to a public beach on a holiday weekend of record-breaking heat only renewed criticism of Burning Man, an event that is often derided as elitist and exclusionary, despite its stated principles of radical inclusion and self-reliance.
Burning Man, which takes place each year in Nevada’s remote Black Rock desert, actually began on a San Francisco beach in 1986 when a group of friends built a figure out of wood and burned him. Since then it has grown into a massive international arts and music festival that attracts 80,000 participants a year, with the cheapest tickets costing hundreds of dollars.
While organizers cancelled the festival in April and announced a “virtual Burning Man”, festival enthusiasts gathered last week for in-person local events around the world, including thousands of people in scattered groups in the Nevada desert, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported.
One Bay Area investor who said he had attended a Burning Man gathering on Saturday at San Francisco’s Baker Beach, where the festival was founded in 1986, defended the event as no more dangerous that typical weekend gatherings at one of the city’s popular parks, writing: “Every single person I saw was wearing a mask.”
Shahid Buttar, a progressive candidate who challenged Nancy Pelosi in a Democratic congressional primary earlier this year, called the Ocean Beach gathering “lovely” and tweeted that he had seen “dozens of groups scattered across the beach at sunset”.
The tweet received dozens of angry replies from locals who saw the gathering as careless and self-absorbed, particularly when held in a major city struggling with coronavirus, not in the “Deep Playa”, the Burning Man term for the outer reaches of the festival stretching into the desert.
It felt lovely to get a brief taste of #BurningMan at Ocean Beach yesterday.
— Shahid Buttar (@Sheeyahshee) September 7, 2020
I stood on the roof of a street legal art car rhyming over house music, looking out over dozens of groups scattered across the beach at sunset.
The sight—and the vibe—both felt like deep playa. pic.twitter.com/4Kgh7flHZ2
Even typical boosters of San Francisco’s alternative arts scene had harsh words for the celebrations, particularly on a weekend when wildfires burning across California had already made the region’s air unhealthy to breathe.
“Why were people burning fires when the air quality index was over 200 in parts of the city?” journalist Marke Bieschke wrote on 48Hills, a local news site. “What does it look like to have a mostly white crowd dancing during a pandemic that is deeply affecting communities of color?”
Bieschke asked the organizers of one well-known Burning Man group, who had brought a bus to the beach to DJ a dance party that attracted hundreds, why they had not shut down their event as soon as it had gotten too crowded.
At first, he wrote, the group defended their behavior, saying they had handed out masks and complied with police instructions.
Later, he wrote, the founder apologized, admitting that, even though they were only one of many groups at the beach that night, “we should have stopped the party”.
The organizers of Burning Man did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Sunday morning, shortly after the San Francisco mayor’s tweet, the official Burning Man account urged members of the “our global community” to “refrain from gathering unsafely in large groups, maintain public health, and respect local, state, and federal guidelines”.
