Over the past 50 years, pride events, marches and demonstrations have evolved considerably.
#FIRST GAY PRIDE PARADE FULL#
Although there are still obstacles in achieving full acceptance and protections for the LGBTQ+ community, the progress made just over the past few decades has been significant. Depending on the country or city where the event is being held, the marches and parades often campaign for recognition and acceptance of same-sex marriage, legal protections for couples and families, anti-discrimination laws or trans rights. While the aim of pride day started with a political nature, many cities around the world have such wide acceptance and legal protections that many events have become a celebration of pride for the local LGBTQ+ community. Gay Pride or rather LGBTQ+ pride events (used to be more inclusive), including pride parades and festivals were started in major urban centers to improve the visibility, acceptance and legal protections for LGBTQ+ people living in those communities. The global landscape for LGBTQ+ rights, protections and acceptance varies tremendously by location, with some destinations attracting millions of visitors to their events like Madrid Gay Pride, Sao Paulo Gay Pride or San Francisco Gay Pride, while more than 70 other countries have laws that allow discrimination or persecution of LGBTQ+ people. It's the revolution.The LGBTQ+ rights movement has made tremendous strides over the past few decades and much of the progress in visibility is thanks in part to gay pride parades and marches that have taken place in cities around the world. After all, as one of the defiant transgenders who stood up to police in the Stonewall Inn that first night, the late Sylvia Rivera, said, "I'm not missing a minute of this. So get out this June and take in some of the events and festivities leading up to Chicago's annual Pride Parade. You can literally mark Pride every day of of the month at one event or another. All month long, there are Pride-related concerts, readings, films, plays and much, much more all around the Chicago area. Of course, the celebrations and commemorations aren't just limited to festivals and the parade on the last weekend in June. But there is still much more work to do in order to see equality in our nation.
There is a lot more to celebrate now, thanks to the pioneering activism of those first marchers and others who've toiled to overturn every vestige of discrimination. But, at its core, Pride is still a political, cultural and social statement that LGBTQ people are equal in every way and expect to be treated that way. And those who march, watch and celebrate have swelled from hundreds to hundreds of thousands. Those first Pride parades in Chicago weren't parades as much as defiant political statements. Over the years, the celebration has changed. Thus, a tradition was born, one that's been celebrated in Chicago on the last weekend of June ever since. A year after the riots LGBTQ activists in Chicago and Los Angeles went on the march to mark the anniversary of the New York uprising and to assert that LGBTQs everywhere would no longer accept second-class treatment. The Stonewall Riots changed New York but they had an impact far beyond the banks of the Hudson. The next day thousands flocked to the street outside the bar to signal that, once and for all, LGBTQ people would keep fighting, proud and loud, for freedom from harassment and discrimination.
Instead, as a crowd began to gather outside the Stonewall Inn in New York's Greenwich Village, the drag queens and others who were supposed to meekly submit to the usual police harassment fought back. The police wagons pulled up and the cops started loading the bar patrons into them.īut this night, June 28, 1969, the patrons didn't follow the script. They separated the drag queens so female officers could feel them up to determine if they were men dressed as women. A handful of cops stormed into a small, packed bar full of LGBTQ people and began lining them up.