NEW YORKAs huge parades and marches take place in New York and other major cities across the world on Sunday, the month-long celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride approaches its rainbow-laden finale.
With over 700 participant groups and anticipated enormous crowds, the celebrations in Manhattan, the site of the oldest and largest Pride celebration in the country, begin with a march down Fifth Avenue.
The Stonewall Inn, a homosexual bar in Greenwich Village where a 1969 police raid sparked demonstrations and stoked the LGBTQ+ rights movement, will be passed by marchers. Today, the location is a national monument.
Another of the biggest Pride marches in the world will take place in San Francisco, where marchers will travel along Market Street to the Civic Center Plaza, where concert stages will be put up. A post-march party is also being held inside San Francisco’s enormous City Hall.
Other large cities in North America that will have Pride parades on Sunday include Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Toronto, Canada.
While some international cities, like London in July and Rio de Janeiro in November, have their festivities later in the year, Tokyo, Paris, and São Paulo hosted theirs earlier this month.
In 1970, to mark the first anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, New York City hosted its inaugural Pride March.
Pride celebrations usually consist of a daylong mix of political protest and joyous street festivals, but this year’s will be more defiant than previous years, according to organizers.
Days have passed since the Supreme Court’s historic June 26, 2015, decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage across the country.
However, President Donald Trump’s Republican Party has attempted to reverse LGBTQ+-friendly laws.
Trump has singled out transgender individuals since he took office in January, removing them from the military, blocking federal insurance programs from funding youth gender-affirmation surgery, and trying to keep transgender athletes out of women’s and girls’ sports.
Rise Up: Pride in Protest is the fitting topic for the Manhattan event, while Queer Joy is Resistance is the theme for San Francisco and Louder is the theme for Seattle.
Patti Hearn, executive director of Seattle Pride, stated in a statement prior to the gathering that now is not the time to remain silent. We’ll get up. We’ll raise our voices. We will become noisy.
The loss of corporate sponsorship is one of the key challenges gay rights organizations are facing this year.
Due to changing public sentiment, American businesses have stopped supporting Pride events, which is part of a larger retreat from diversity and inclusion initiatives.
About 20% of NYC Pride’s corporate sponsors, including PepsiCo and Nissan, ceased or scaled back their sponsorship, the organization announced earlier this month. Comcast and Anheuser-Busch were among the five big corporate contributors that the organizers of San Francisco Pride announced had stopped supporting them.
