Pride parade

A pride parade is an event celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer social and self-acceptance, achievements, legal rights, and pride. The events sometimes also serve as demonstrations for legal rights such as same-sex marriage. Most occur annually throughout the Western world, while some take place every June to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, which was 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, New York City, Los Angeles, 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, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, with five million attending in Manhattan alone.

Background

In the 1960s and 1970s a surge of public demonstrations in the US focused on civil rights, anti-war movements, and early LGBTQ+ rights activism. One of the first demonstrations for the cause of gay and lesbian rights was a 1965 "homophile march" by the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis outside the White House, highlighting discrimination in federal employment and advancing LGBTQ+ equality.
Also in 1965, the gay rights protest movement was visible at the Annual Reminder pickets, again organized by members of the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis, and the gay men's group Mattachine Society. Mattachine members were also involved in demonstrations in support of homosexuals imprisoned in Cuban labor camps. Early on the morning of Saturday, June 28, 1969, LGBTQ people rioted following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City. The Stonewall Inn was a gay bar which catered to an assortment of patrons, but which was popular with the most marginalized people in the gay community: transvestites, transgender people, effeminate young men, hustlers, and homeless youth.

First pride marches

As the movement became more radical in the late 1960s, particularly after the Stonewall Uprising, they were called Gay Liberation or Gay Freedom marches which emphasized demands for full equality and liberation.
On Saturday, June 27, 1970, the Chicago Gay Liberation organized a march from Washington Square Park to the Water Tower at the intersection of Michigan and Chicago avenues, which was the route originally planned, and then many of the participants spontaneously marched on to the Civic Center Plaza. The date was chosen because the Stonewall events began on the last Saturday of June and because organizers wanted to reach the maximum number of Michigan Avenue shoppers.
The West Coast of the United States saw a march in San Francisco on June 27, 1970, and 'Gay-in' on June 28, 1970 and a march in Los Angeles on June 28, 1970. In Los Angeles, Morris Kight, Reverend Troy Perry and Reverend Bob Humphries gathered to plan a commemoration. They settled on a parade down Hollywood Boulevard. But securing a permit from the city was no easy task. They named their organization Christopher Street West, "as ambiguous as we could be." But Rev. Perry recalled the Los Angeles Police Chief Edward M. Davis telling him, "As far as I'm concerned, granting a permit to a group of homosexuals to parade down Hollywood Boulevard would be the same as giving a permit to a group of thieves and robbers." Grudgingly, the Police Commission granted the permit, though there were fees exceeding $1.5 million. After the American Civil Liberties Union stepped in, the commission dropped all its requirements but a $1,500 fee for police service. That, too, was dismissed when the California Superior Court ordered the police to provide protection as they would for any other group. The eleventh-hour California Supreme Court decision ordered the police commissioner to issue a parade permit citing the "constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression." From the beginning, L.A. parade organizers and participants knew there were risks of violence. Kight received death threats right up to the morning of the parade. Unlike later editions, the first gay parade was very quiet. The marchers convened on Mccadden Place in Hollywood, marched north and turned east onto Hollywood Boulevard. The Advocate reported "Over 1,000 homosexuals and their friends staged, not just a protest march, but a full-blown parade down world-famous Hollywood Boulevard."
File:Gay-button-Christopher-Street-liberation-day-1971-June-27.jpg|thumb|Christopher Street Liberation Day button promoting the second annual NYC Pride March on June 27, 1971On Sunday, June 28, 1970, at around noon, in New York gay activist groups held their own pride parade, known as the Christopher Street Liberation Day, to recall the events of Stonewall one year earlier. On November 2, 1969, Craig Rodwell, his partner Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy, and Linda Rhodes proposed the first gay pride parade to be held in New York City by way of a resolution at the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations meeting in Philadelphia.
All attendees to the ERCHO meeting in Philadelphia voted for the march except for the Mattachine Society of New York City, which abstained. Members of the Gay Liberation Front attended the meeting and were seated as guests of Rodwell's group, Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods.
Meetings to organize the march began in early January at Rodwell's apartment in 350 Bleecker Street. At first there was difficulty getting some of the major New York organizations like Gay Activists Alliance to send representatives. Craig Rodwell and his partner Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy, Michael Brown, Marty Nixon, and Foster Gunnison of Mattachine made up the core group of the CSLD Umbrella Committee. For initial funding, Gunnison served as treasurer and sought donations from the national homophile organizations and sponsors, while Sargeant solicited donations via the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop customer mailing list and Nixon worked to gain financial support from GLF in his position as treasurer for that organization. Other mainstays of the GLF organizing committee were Judy Miller, Jack Waluska, Steve Gerrie and Brenda Howard. Believing that more people would turn out for the march on a Sunday, and so as to mark the date of the start of the Stonewall uprising, the CSLDUC scheduled the date for the first march for Sunday, June 28, 1970. With Dick Leitsch's replacement as president of Mattachine NY by Michael Kotis in April 1970, opposition to the march by Mattachine ended.
The first marches were both serious and fun and served to inspire the widening LGBTQ movement; they were repeated in the following years and more and more annual marches started up in other cities throughout the world. In Atlanta and New York City the marches were called Gay Liberation Marches, and the day of celebration was called "Gay Liberation Day"; in Los Angeles and San Francisco they became known as 'Gay Freedom Marches' and the day was called "Gay Freedom Day". As more cities and even smaller towns began holding their own celebrations, these names spread. The rooted ideology behind the parades is a critique of space which has been produced to seem heteronormative and 'straight', and therefore any act appearing to be homosexual is considered dissident by society. The Parade brings this queer culture into the space. The marches spread internationally, including to London where the first "gay pride rally" took place on 1 July 1972, the date chosen deliberately to mark the third anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
In the 1980s, there was a cultural shift in the gay movement. Activists of a less radical nature began taking over the march committees in different cities, and they dropped "Gay Liberation" and "Gay Freedom" from the names, replacing them with "Gay Pride". The term "Gay Pride" was claimed to be coined either by Jack Baker and Michael McConnell, an activist couple in Minnesota, or by Thom Higgins, another gay rights activist in Minnesota.
West Asia had its first pride march in 1993 in Israel. The pride march has grown to over 250,000 participants by 2019. In 2017, the first pride march week in the Middle East was established in Lebanon.
The oldest LGBT community center in South Florida Pridelines has been a partner of Miami Beach Pride for more than a decade.
In Southeast Asia, the first pride march was celebrated on June 26, 1994, when 30-50 individuals marched in Quezon City in the Philippines. Less than three decades later, the government rejected an equality legislation, sparking the largest pride march in Southeast Asia, where over 110,000 people in 2023 marched in Quezon City in support of the SOGIE Equality Bill.
East Asia saw its first pride march on August 28, 1994, when a march was held in Tokyo in Japan. The largest ever pride march in the region was held in 2022 when over 120,000 people marched in Taiwan to support equal rights.
The first pride march in South Asia was held on July 2, 1999, in the city of Kolkata in India.

Timeline of first pride marches

This table provides a chronological timeline of the established public Pride marches and parades globally. While many countries had earlier private gatherings, indoor festivals, or small-scale protests, this list prioritizes the first instances of organized, high-visibility street demonstrations specifically identifying as Pride.

Established

Country

Per year

Total

1970

LGBT rights in the|United States

Regional context and challenges

Along with the Vatican City, Armenia remains one of the few European countries that has never held a public LGBTQ Pride demonstration. While the local community has organized indoor small festivals, these events are consistently targeted by violent extremists. To date, no public street parade has occurred due to extreme security threats and government refusal to provide necessary protection.
A small group of activists performed a brief, unsanctioned walk through Baku with a rainbow flag in 2013. Since then, activism has remained almost entirely digital or indoor to avoid state crackdowns.
A 'Love Parade' was successfully held in Minsk in 1999. It has never been repeated as a public event. Between 2001 and 2012, activists made several attempts to organize marches, most notably the 2010 'Slavic Pride', but these were unauthorized and violently dispersed by riot police within minutes. Under the current administration, public Pride demonstrations are entirely prohibited.
While "Shanghai Pride" was a significant event for many years, it primarily consisted of private gatherings, such as parties and film festivals, rather than public demonstrations. Despite its prominence, a street parade through the city was never permitted by the government. After years of operation, Shanghai Pride officially ended its activities in 2020 due to increasing pressure from authorities.
In 2013, a stationary rally was violently attacked by thousands of protesters led by priests. By 2019, activists pulled off a "guerrilla style" moving march lasting only 30 minutes to prevent disruption. In 2021 and 2023, larger marches were canceled after violent groups attacked Pride offices. The 2024 anti-LGBTQ law has further restricted the ability to organize public events.
There has never been a public Pride march due to increasing social and political pressure. During the 2010s, community-led festivals were held, but this period also marked the beginning of a harsh crackdown. As recently as 2025, authorities have conducted several large-scale arrests. This environment has been further restricted by the "no sex outside of marriage" law, which effectively criminalizes LGBTQ relationships as same-sex marriage is not recognized.
While private gatherings occurred for years, Jamaica held its first high-profile, week-long Pride celebration in 2015 in Kingston. Due to high rates of violence and "buggery" laws still on the books, events are mostly held in secure, private venues or community spaces.
There have never been official pride parades in Kazakhstan. LGBTQ visibility has largely been limited to small groups within broader Russian-speaking, feminist-led protests, as well as to individual acts of protest by lesbian feminist activists. Some of these actions, such as a photoshoot staged outside the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi involving a rainbow flag were met with strong criticism from both the public and government authorities, who denounced them as disrespectful and provocative. Eventually, these actions fueled a conservative backlash, contributing to a rise in homophobia and the enactment of harsh anti-LGBTQ laws in late 2025.
On March 8, 2019, a notable demonstration took place in Bishkek on International Women's Day. While LGBTQ activists participated with rainbow flags, the event was primarily organized by feminist groups to protest violence against women. Since the demonstration was largely led by feminist activists and focused on broader gender rights, it is generally seen as a human rights march rather than a gay pride parade.
In 2017, the country launched 'Beirut Pride' as the first event of its kind in the Arab world. While several indoor cultural events were held, the planned street parade was canceled after organizers were briefly detained and threatened with 'incitement to debauchery' charges.
Early efforts to organize Pride events were met with extreme violence from state authorities and counter-protesters. Demonstrations were frequently targeted by extremist groups who assaulted participants with impunity. These attempts were unauthorized and violently suppressed within minutes, preventing them from evolving into established public marches. Such activities are now entirely curtailed by anti-LGBTQ laws and the 2023 legal designation of the movement as an 'extremist organization.'
In 2012, activists managed to hold a small mobile march along a private beach road in Entebbe. However, the passage of the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act has made the environment much more dangerous. Pride events are regularly raided by authorities, and activists are forced to cancel public demonstrations entirely to avoid life imprisonment or the death penalty.