Pride Parades Combine Celebration, Calls to Action

Pride Month celebrations peaked Sunday with big parades in New York, San Francisco, and other cities on the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, which accelerated and transformed the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. Pride events often mix celebration and calls to action, reflecting the political winds, cultural climate, and news around LGBTQ+ rights. "As LGBTQIA+ events and symbols are being erased, it's vital that our community have safe spaces to show up and march to make clear: We are here," Chris Piedmont, a spokesperson for New York parade organizers Heritage of Pride, said in a statement Friday. "We will not be erased."

Carlos Duarte came in from Long Island to attend New York's parade Sunday. "It's very important for us to be here … to be all together for love, peace and to show the world who we are," Duarte said. Against that backdrop, the NYC Pride March and the San Francisco Pride Parade set out to further their legacies as among the world's largest and oldest such celebrations. Both trace their roots to events held in 1970 to commemorate the Stonewall rebellion on June 28, 1969, when patrons of a New York gay bar called the Stonewall Inn resisted a police raid and ended up kindling a wave of activism. The Stonewall Inn still is a bar; the Stonewall monument centers on a small park across the street, about a half-mile from the Pride March route at its closest point.

Also set for Sunday in Manhattan was the newer Queer Liberation March, founded by activists who saw the Pride March as too corporate and official. This year, some transgender rights activists also pressured Pride organizers to bar some New York City hospitals' contingents from marching because the institutions announced in recent months that they would stop providing transgender youth treatments. The cutoff came after funding threats from the Trump administration, and at least some of the hospitals also got federal Justice Department subpoenas for transgender patients' medical records. A judge has temporarily blocked the document demand.