US cities cap Pride Month with a mix of party and protest

The monthlong celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride is reaching its rainbow-laden crescendo as New York and other major cities around the world host major parades and marches

NEW YORK -- The monthlong celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride reaches its rainbow-laden crescendo as New York and other major cities around the world host major parades and marches on Sunday.

The festivities in Manhattan, home to the nation’s oldest and largest Pride celebration, kick off with a march down Fifth Avenue featuring more than 700 participating groups and expected huge crowds.

Marchers will wind past the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar where a 1969 police raid triggered protests and fired up the LGBTQ+ rights movement. The site is now a national monument.

In San Francisco, marchers in another of the world’s largest Pride events will head down the city’s central Market Street, reaching concert stages set up at the Civic Center Plaza. San Francisco’s mammoth City Hall is also among the venues hosting a post-march party.

Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and Toronto, Canada are among the other major North American cities hosting Pride parades on Sunday.

Several global cities including Tokyo, Paris and Sao Paulo, held their events earlier this month while others come later in the year, including London in July and Rio de Janeiro in November.

The first pride march was held in New York City in 1970 to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

Pride celebrations are typically a daylong mix of jubilant street parties and political protest, but organizers said this year’s iterations will take a more defiant stance than recent years.

The festivities come days after the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark June 26, 2015, ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that recognized same-sex marriage nationwide.

But Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, have sought to roll back LGBTQ+ friendly policies.

Since taking office in January, Trump has specifically targeted transgender people, removing them from the military, preventing federal insurance programs from paying for gender-affirmation surgeries for young people and attempting to keep transgender athletes out of girls and women’s sports.

The theme for the Manhattan event is, appropriately, “Rise Up: Pride in Protest." San Francisco’s Pride theme is “Queer Joy is Resistance” while Seattle’s is simply “Louder.”

“This is not a time to be quiet,” Patti Hearn, Seattle Pride’s executive director, said in a statement ahead of the event. “We will stand up. We will speak up. We will get loud.”

Among the other headwinds faced by gay rights groups this year is the loss of corporate sponsorship.

American companies have pulled back support of Pride events, reflecting a broader walking back of diversity and inclusion efforts amid shifting public sentiment.

NYC Pride said earlier this month that about 20% of its corporate sponsors dropped or reduced support, including PepsiCo and Nissan. Organizers of San Francisco Pride said they lost the support of five major corporate donors, including Comcast and Anheuser-Busch.