Millions Worldwide March to Celebrate Gay Pride

 

 

 

 

Paradegoers in costume make thier way down Peachtree
Street in Atlanta's Gay Pride Parade, June 24, 2001.

Compiled by Brendan Conley

Millions of gays and lesbians marched around the world in gay pride celebrations last weekend. The festivals combined fun and politics, as parades, music, and flamboyant costumes mixed with demands for equal rights for gays and lesbians.

“This is a great opportunity to raise the visibility of the gay community,” said San Francisco city supervisor Mark Leno, who is openly gay and served as one of the parade’s five marshals. San Francisco’s gay pride parade, the world’s largest, drew an estimated 1 million people this year, the 31st annual celebration for the city. The parade was led by a lesbian motorcade, which included topless riders waving rainbow flags. The annual festival is California’s largest public event. The city’s large gay and lesbian population has made it a leader in gay rights. Last month the city approved sex-change benefits for city employees.

The gay pride event in New York featured three dozen gay couples celebrating their same-sex partnerships in a commitment ceremony. The couples were blessed by ministers and a rabbi at the entrance to Central Park just before the Heritage of Pride parade. New York is considered the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement. In 1969, patrons of Stonewall, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, fought back against a police raid. A parade commemorating the event the next year was copied by other cities in subsequent years.

The New York marriage ceremonies were not legally binding, but served as a rallying point for activists who would like to see same-sex couples accorded the same legal rights as heterosexual couples.

Vermont is the only state that offers gay couples the option of civil unions, which give them the same rights as married couples.

Paris and Berlin celebrated gay pride on Saturday with rollicking parades that drew revelers who held hands, waved rainbow banners and danced to techno beats. The cities’ mayors, both gay, were at the center of the festivities.

Bertrand Delanoe — the first Paris mayor to participate in his city’s parade — held a banner reading “All together against discrimination,” as he led a parade of tens of thousands in the French capital. Police said there were 250,000 demonstrators and the same number of spectators.

In Berlin, the brightly striped rainbow flag symbolizing the gay rights movement flew over city hall for the first time, as hundreds of thousands turned out to watch or participate in the parade.

In 1999, France passed a law giving unmarried couples - including gays - some of the same rights as married couples, including the right to file joint tax forms. But France’s efforts are considered a step behind several of its neighbors’ attempts to promote gay rights.

On Friday, the Belgian government approved a bill to fully legalize same-sex weddings, a measure that, if approved by parliament, would make the country the second in the world to recognize gay marriages, after the Netherlands.

An estimated 180,000 people marched to booming disco beats and the flutter of rainbow flags through Sao Paulo, Brazil on Sunday in Latin America’s biggest gay pride parade.

Eighteen floats, with music, go-go dancers and drag queens, marched to the city center for a colorful stage show on a square that is home to many gay bars.

On Gay Pride Day in Israel’s most cosmopolitan city, dozens of black-clad Israeli and Palestinian gays linked arms and marched Friday to protest Israel’s continued occupation of parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Whistling and chanting under the banner, “There is no pride in the oppression of others,” the group of about 150 lesbians and homosexuals was in stark contrast to bare-chested cupids and fuchsia-haired drag queens featured in a larger parade.

A 34-year-old Palestinian lawyer from the West Bank town of Ramallah said Palestinian and Israeli homosexuals found it easier than their straight counterparts to find common ground.

Gays and lesbians from Asheville and from across the American South flocked to Atlanta this weekend for the South’s largest gay pride event. Fifteen candidates for public office mixed in with AIDS service organizations and party floats from gay bars in the Sunday parade through the Midtown district. On Saturday, tens of thousands packed Piedmont Park, where more than 50 musicians and performers entertained the crowd from two stages. The event is a celebration with a political message.

“I think, surprisingly, the city of Atlanta seems to be more welcoming to the gay and lesbian community,” said Donna Narducci, executive director of Atlanta Pride Inc. The city offers health benefits to partners of gay and lesbian employees, as do several major corporations headquartered here, including Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines.

Friday, there was also a somber reminder of the devastation AIDS has wrought. At a 7:30 candlelight vigil in John Howell Park in Virginia-Highland, speakers talked about the struggle against the disease.

“The real focus of the vigil is the contributions that lesbians and gay men have had in the fight against AIDS,” said Jeff Graham, executive director of the AIDS Survival Project in Atlanta. Graham said federal data show that at least 10,000 people in metro Atlanta have HIV or AIDS.

In Chicago, a crowd of about 300,000 marched in that city’s gay pride event. Protesters took the opportunity to confront Cook County States Attorney Dick Devine, accused of failing to prosecute police officers who commit hate crimes.

Gay pride events take place in more than 200 cities each year, according to Interpride, an organization that coordinates the events. Many take place on the same weekend in June.

In North Carolina, an OutCharlotte cultural event is planned for October 3-7 in Charlotte, and the North Carolina PrideFest is planned for September 29 in Durham.

Sources: Associated Press, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Industrial Workers of the World News Service, Interpride (www.interpride.org), NC Pride (www.ncpride.org).