LGBTQ community
Pride parades march on with new urgency across US
Pride parades kicked off in New York City and around the country Sunday with glittering confetti, cheering crowds, fluttering rainbow flags and newfound fears about losing freedoms won through decades of activism.
The annual marches in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere took place just two days after one conservative justice on the Supreme Court signaled, in a ruling on abortion, that the court should reconsider the right to same-sex marriage recognized in 2015.
“We’re here to make a statement," said 31-year-old Mercedes Sharpe, who traveled to Manhattan from Massachusetts. “I think it’s about making a point, rather than all the other years like how we normally celebrate it. This one’s really gonna stand out. I think a lot of angry people, not even just women, angry men, angry women."
Thousands of people — many decked in pride colors — lined the parade route through Manhattan, cheering as floats and marchers passed by. Organizers announced this weekend that a Planned Parenthood contingent would be at the front of the parade.
In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot called the top court ruling a “momentary setback” and said Sunday’s events were “an opportunity for us to not only celebrate Pride, but be resolved for the fight.”
“We will not live in a world, not in my city, where our rights are taken from us or rolled back,” said Lightfoot, Chicago’s first openly gay mayor, and the first Black woman to hold the office.
Read:Spanish LGBTQ groups wary of monkeypox stigma as Pride nears
In San Francisco, some marchers and spectators held signs condemning the court’s abortion ruling. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who rode in a convertible holding a gavel and a rainbow fan, said the large turnout was an acknowledgement that Americans support gay rights.
“Even in spite of the majority on the court that’s anti our Constitution, our country knows and loves our LGBTQI+ community,” she told KGO-TV.
The warning shot from the nation's top court came after a year of legislative defeats for the LGBTQ community, including the passage of laws in some states limiting the discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity with children.
As anti-gay sentiments resurface, some are pushing for the parades to return to their roots — less blocks-long street parties, more overtly civil rights marches.
“It has gone from being a statement of advocacy and protest to being much more of a celebration of gay life,” Sean Clarkin, 67, said of New York City's annual parade while enjoying a drink recently at Julius', one of the oldest gay bars in Manhattan's Greenwich Village.
As he remembers things, the parade was once about defiance and pushing against an oppressive mainstream that saw gays, lesbians and transgender people as unworthy outsiders.
“As satisfying and empowering as it may be to now be accepted by the mainstream,” Clarkin said, “there was also something energizing and wonderful about being on the outside looking in.”
New York's first Pride March, then called the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, was held in 1970 to mark the first anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, a spontaneous street uprising triggered by a police raid on a gay bar in Manhattan.
San Francisco's first march was in 1972 and had been held every year since, except during the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Celebrations are now global, taking place throughout the year in multiple countries, with many of the biggest parades taking place in June. One of the world's largest, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, was held June 19.
In the United States, this year's celebrations take place amid a potential crisis.
In a Supreme Court ruling Friday striking down the right to abortion, Justice Clarence Thomas said in a concurring opinion that the court should also reconsider its 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage and a 2003 decision striking down laws criminalizing gay sex.
New York City parade spectator Jackie English said she and her fiancee Dana had yet to set a wedding date, but have a new sense of urgency.
“Now we feel a bit pressured," she said, adding they might “jump the gun a little sooner. Because, what if that right gets taken away from us?”
More than a dozen states have recently enacted laws that go against the interests of LGBTQ communities, including a law barring any mention of sexual orientation in school curricula in Florida and threats of prosecution for parents who allow their children to get gender-affirming care in Texas.
Several states have put laws in place prohibiting transgender athletes from participating in team sports that coincide with the gender in which they identify.
According to an Anti-Defamation League survey released earlier this week, members of LGBTQ communities were more likely than any other group to experience harassment. Two-thirds of respondents said they have been harassed, a little more than half of whom said the harassment was a result of their sexual orientation.
In recent years, schisms over how to commemorate Stonewall have opened, spawning splinter groups events intended to be more protest-oriented.
Read:Prospects dim for passage of LGBTQ rights bill in Senate
In New York City, the Queer Liberation March takes place at the same time as the traditional parade, billing itself as the “antidote to the corporate-infused, police-entangled, politician-heavy Parades that now dominate pride celebrations."
San Francisco's parade was marked by the return of uniformed police, who were banned in 2020 after a 2019 confrontation with protesters who staged a parade-stopping sit-in. Critics accused them of using excessive force. On Sunday, San Francisco Police Chief William Scott, in full dress uniform, passed out small rainbow pride flags to spectators.
Despite the criticism of growing commercialism, a strong streak of activism was apparent among attendees this year.
“The recent overturning of Roe v. Wade has caused a very strong uproar about what went down," said Dean Jigarjian, 22, who crossed the river from New Jersey with his girlfriend to take part in the New York City parade. “So as you can see here, the crowd seems to be very energized about what could be next.”
Spanish LGBTQ groups wary of monkeypox stigma as Pride nears
With one of Europe's largest gay pride celebrations right around the corner, Spain's LGBTQ community is worried that the outbreaks of monkeypox on the continent could lead to an increase in homophobic sentiment based on misunderstandings of the disease.
Spanish health authorities said Thursday that there were now 84 confirmed cases in the country, the highest number in Europe. The tally includes one woman, the region of Madrid said in a statement on Friday without providing any further details.
Also read: United Arab Emirates detects first case of monkeypox
Health authorities have been centering their investigations on links between a Gay Pride event in the Canary Islands that drew some 80,000 people at the beginning of May, and cases linked to a Madrid sauna.
But some people, particularly gay and bisexual men, believe there is a touch of homophobic hysteria in the wider public's reaction to the rare outbreak of the disease outside of Africa, where it has long been endemic.
Most of the known cases in Europe have been among men who have sex with men, according to authorities in Britain, Spain, Germany and Portugal. A top adviser to the World Health Organization said the outbreak was likely triggered by sexual activity at two recent mass events in Europe.
The outbreak in Spain comes in the run-up to Madrid’s Gay Pride celebration, which will happen in early July. It is expected to draw large crowds, unlike the last two years' events, which were scaled down or canceled because of COVID-19 restrictions. Organizers say the city's last pre-pandemic Pride celebration, in 2019, drew roughly 1.6 million revelers, though police put the figure at around 400,000.
“Pride is a huge party, it is a moment to make our voice be heard, that brings lots of people together,” Mario Blázquez, coordinator of health programs for the LGBTQ group COGAM in Madrid, told The Associated Press.
Blázquez said he's worried that next month’s Pride celebrations could be endangered by overzealous restrictions driven in part by prejudice and in part by the fears of another public health emergency on top of the lingering COVID-19 pandemic.
“We don’t know what will happen. We don’t know what the level of transmission of the virus will be or what legal measures could be taken. And then what stigma could be generated by these legal measures that sometimes are discriminatory.”
So far, Spanish authorities have not mentioned any sweeping public health measures that would impede large gatherings.
But beyond the Pride March, Blázquez said he is worried that society could make the same mistake it did at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s, when the focus on the disease among gay men obscured its spread among the wider population.
“This is a disease that any member of the population can get,” Blázquez said. “We are facing an outbreak that unfortunately once again has hit LGBTQ people, and especially gay and bisexual men. What's happening is somewhat similar to the first cases of HIV.”
Health authorities in Europe, North America, Israel and Australia have identified more than 150 cases of the disease in recent weeks. It’s a surprising outbreak of a disease that rarely appears outside Africa, where it has remained a serious health threat since the first cases in human were discovered in the 1970s.
Also read:New Monkeypox Outbreak: What We Know So Far
Experts say anyone can be infected through close contact with a sick person, their clothing or bedsheets. Most people recover within two to four weeks without needing hospitalization. However, the WHO says that in recent times 3-6% of cases were fatal.
Health officials around the world are keeping watch for more cases because, for the first time, the disease appears to be spreading among people who didn’t travel to Africa. They stress, however, that the risk to the general population is low.
As of Thursday, Italy had confirmed 10 cases of Monkeypox, some but not all in people who had traveled to Spain's Canary Islands.
“Regarding the question of sexual transmission, I believe that we cannot yet define this strictly as a sexually transmitted disease," said Dr. Andrea Antinori, Director of Viral Immunodeficiencies at Spallanzani hospital in Rome.
"So I would avoid identifying this disease as a sexually transmitted disease at the moment, and above all, identifying the population — the men who have sex with men — as carriers of this disease because I believe that this is also a problem of responsibility from the point of view of not stigmatizing this situation.
"This disease is still to be understood because we are facing a new wave that is different from how we have historically known it in the previous decades.”
Spain's health minister, Carolina Darias, said Wednesday that her government decided to opt into the European Union's collective purchase of monkeypox vaccine, which like the COVID-19 vaccine will be distributed based on each participating country's population. She said government health experts are considering how to use the vaccine once it is more widely available.
Amos García, president of the Spanish Association of Vaccinology, recommended that the vaccine should only be given to people who have had direct contact with an infected person and who are vulnerable to infection, not to the general population.
“We are talking about a disease that does not have a large potential to become an epidemic,” García said, adding that most Spaniards over age 40 should be protected by smallpox vaccines that were regularly administered decades ago.