A pride parade is an outdoor event celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social and self-acceptance, achievements, legal rights, and pride. The events sometimes also serve as demonstrations for legal rights such as same-sex marriage. Pride events occur in many urban areas in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and Australia. Most occur annually while some take place every June to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, a pivotal moment in modern LGBTQ social movements. The parades seek to create community and honor the history of the movement. In 1970, pride and protest marches were held in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco around the first anniversary of Stonewall. The events became annual and grew internationally. In 2019, New York and the world celebrated the largest international Pride celebration in history: Stonewall 50 - WorldPride NYC 2019, produced by Heritage of Pride commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, with five million attending in Manhattan alone. The most recent New York pride event was NYC Pride March 2022, which occurred on June 26, 2022.
São Paulo LGBTQ Pride Parade is an annual gay pride parade that has taken place in Avenida Paulista, in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, since 1997. It is South America’s largest Pride parade, and is listed by Guinness World Records as the biggest pride parade in the world starting in 2006 with 2.5 million people. They broke the Guinness record in 2009 with four million attendees. They have kept the title from 2006 to at least 2016. They had five million attendants in 2017. As of 2019 it has three to five million attendants each year. In 2019, it was also the second larger event of the city of São Paulo in terms of total revenue and the first in terms of daily revenue. In 2010, the city hall of São Paulo invested 1 million reais in the parade. According to the LGBT app Grindr, the gay parade of the city was elected the best in the world.
Brighton and Hove Pride is an annual LGBT pride event held in the city of Brighton and Hove, England, organised by Brighton Pride, a community interest company (CIC) who promote equality and diversity, and advance education to eliminate discrimination against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) community.
Pride in London is an annual LGBT pride festival and parade held each summer in London, England. The event, which was formerly run by Pride London, is sometimes referred to as London Pride.
The NYC Pride March is an annual event celebrating the LGBTQ community in New York City. Among the largest Pride events in the world, the NYC Pride March attracts tens of thousands of participants and millions of sidewalk spectators each June. The route of the Pride parade through Lower Manhattan traverses south on Fifth Avenue, through Greenwich Village, passing the Stonewall National Monument, site of the June 1969 riots that launched the modern movement for LGBTQ+ rights. It is also the largest Pride parade in the United States.
The Houston Gay Pride Parade is the major feature of a gay pride festival held annually since 1979. The festival takes place in June to celebrate the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their allies. This event commemorates the 1969 police raid of the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in New York City's Greenwich Village neighborhood, which is generally considered to be the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.
WorldPride, licensed by InterPride and organized by one of its member organizations, is an event that promotes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer issues on an international level through parades, festivals and other cultural activities. The inaugural WorldPride was held in Rome in 2000. The host cities are selected by InterPride, the International Association of Pride Coordinators, at its annual general meeting. WorldPride celebrations tend to be the largest LGBTQ Pride events for their year.
Atlanta Pride, also colloquially called the Atlanta Gay Pride Festival, is a week-long annual lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) pride festival held in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1971, it is one of the oldest and largest pride festivals in the United States. According to the Atlanta Pride Committee, as of 2017, attendance had continually grown to around 300,000. Originally a pride held in June, Atlanta Pride has been held in October every year since 2008, typically on a weekend closest to National Coming Out Day.
Fierté Montréal, also called Montreal Pride, is an annual LGBT pride festival in Montreal, Quebec. The event was founded in 2007 at the initiative of Montreal’s LGBTQ+ communities after the city's prior Pride festival, Divers/Cité, repositioned itself as a general arts and music festival.
Bristol Pride is an annual festival in the city of Bristol, championing equality and diversity across South West England. Since 2010, the Bristol Pride festival has been organised by the charity 'Bristol Pride'. The festival is a fortnight of events in the city, and concludes with Pride Day on the second Saturday of July. Festival events include a mix of talks by prominent local activists and charities, screenings of LGBT films, performances, and various evenings of entertainment led by local drag artists. Pride Day includes the traditional Pride March, which begins in the city's Castle Park and ends at the Amphitheatre on the harbourside. Bristol Pride remains a free-to-attend festival, but encourages entry to the events by donation to enable the festival to continue.
Equality Parade is an LGBT community pride parade held in Warsaw since 2001, usually in May or June. It has attracted at least several thousand attendees each year; 20,000 attendees were reported in 2006, following an official ban in 2004 and 2005. In 2018, there were 45,000 attendees. In 2019, there were 50,000 attendees. It's a member of EPOA and InterPride.
New York City has been described as the gay capital of the world, and is home to one of the world’s largest LGBTQ populations and the most prominent. Brian Silverman, the author of Frommer's New York City from $90 a Day, wrote the city has "one of the world's largest, loudest, and most powerful LGBT communities", and "Gay and lesbian culture is as much a part of New York's basic identity as yellow cabs, high-rise buildings, and Broadway theatre". LGBT travel guide Queer in the World states, "The fabulosity of Gay New York is unrivaled on Earth, and queer culture seeps into every corner of its five boroughs". LGBT advocate and entertainer Madonna stated metaphorically, “Anyways, not only is New York City the best place in the world because of the queer people here. Let me tell you something, if you can make it here, then you must be queer.”
Queens Liberation Front (QLF) was a homophile group primarily focused on transvestite rights advocacy organization in New York City. QLF was formed in 1969 and active in the 1970s. They published Drag Queens: A Magazine About the Transvestite beginning in 1971. The Queens Liberation Front collaborated with a number of other LGBTQ+ activist groups, including the Gay Activists Alliance and the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.
Hull UK City of Culture 2017 was a designation given to the city of Kingston upon Hull, England, between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2020 by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The designation means that Hull gains access to funding to improve its infrastructure and arts facilities, and will host a series of events celebrating local culture. Hull was selected in 2013 to become the second UK City of Culture since the initiative began in 2013, succeeding Derry.
Hyderabad Queer Pride has been celebrated on one of the Sundays in February since 2013. First held on 3 February 2013, Hyderabad became the 12th Indian city to join the Queer pride march bandwagon, fourteen years after the first Indian pride march was held in Kolkata. In 2015 it was renamed as Hyderabad Queer Swabhimana Pride, emphasising the self-respect and the acceptance of the community of themselves, as they are. In 2016 it was altered to Hyderabad Queer Swabhimana Yatra and has been retained since.
LGBT culture in Leeds, England, involves an active community of people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender/transsexual. A BBC News Online article published in 2012 stated that, while Leeds City Council has not published statistics relating to the number of LGBT residents, the figure can be estimated at 10% of the overall population, which currently suggests a total of at least 77,000. The tenth year of the Leeds Pride march and celebration, held in 2016, was attended by over 40,000 people.
Stonewall 50 – WorldPride NYC 2019 was a series of LGBTQ events and celebrations in June 2019, marking the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots. It was also the first time WorldPride was held in the United States. Held primarily in the metropolitan New York City area, the theme for the celebrations and educational events was "Millions of moments of Pride." The celebration was the largest LGBTQ event in history, with an official estimate of five million attending Pride weekend in Manhattan alone, including an estimated four million in attendance at the parade. The twelve-hour parade included 150,000 pre-registered participants among 695 groups.
RuPaul's DragCon NYC is an annual fan convention and expo of drag culture held in New York City, which debuted in September 2017. It is based on the successful RuPaul's DragCon LA which was launched in Los Angeles in 2015 billed as a “convention that celebrates ‘the art of drag, queer culture and self-expression for all’”. The NYC event is considered the "world's largest celebration of drag culture" with 100,000 attendees. The event is an outgrowth of the internationally successful RuPaul's Drag Race, which generated Drag Race Thailand, RuPaul's Drag Race UK, RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars, and Chile's The Switch Drag Race. RuPaul's Drag Race and the two DragCons come from World of Wonder Entertainment (WOW), a production company based in Los Angeles. The first RuPaul's DragCon NYC was held in 2018 at the Javits Center, with over 40,000 attendees at the two-day all-ages event; it “garnered 687 million (online) impressions in 2018.” Based on the success of the original LA event, the NYC event expanded to three days in 2019, both had over 100,000 attendees in 2019.
The New York City Drag March, or NYC Drag March, is an annual drag protest and visibility march taking place in June, the traditional LGBTQ pride month in New York City. Organized to coincide ahead of the NYC Pride March, both demonstrations commemorate the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn, widely considered the pivotal event sparking the gay liberation movement, and the modern fight for LGBT rights.
Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH), Drag Queen Storytime, Drag Story Time, and Drag Story Hour are children's events first started in 2015 by author and activist Michelle Tea in San Francisco with the goals of promoting reading and diversity. The events, usually geared for children aged 3–11, are hosted by drag queens who read children’s books, and engage in other learning activities in public libraries. The DSH concept is seen as unconventional as the libraries are usually more reserved, and the queens traditionally are associated with bars and nightlife.
