NYC Pride March


New York City Pride March is an event celebrating the LGBTQ community; it is one of the largest annual Pride marches in the world, attracting tens of thousands of participants and millions of sidewalk spectators each June. The route of the Pride march 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. The March is among the largest components of NYC Pride, together with the Rally, PrideFest, and Pride Island events. The largest NYC Pride March to date coincided with the Stonewall 50 – WorldPride NYC 2019 festivities, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the riots at the Stonewall Inn, with 150,000 participants and five million visitors to Manhattan on Pride weekend; an estimated four million attended the parade.

Origins

Early on the morning of Saturday, June 28, 1969, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people rioted, following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar at 53 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan. This event, together with further protests and rioting over the following nights, marked a watershed moment in the modern LGBT rights movement and the impetus for organizing LGBT pride marches on a much larger scale. Veterans of the riot formed a group, the , which has continued to drive the advancement of LGBT rights from the rioting at the Stonewall Inn, to the present day.
In the weeks following the riots, 500 people gathered for a "Gay Power" demonstration in Washington Square Park, followed by a march to Sheridan Square.
On November 2, 1969, Craig Rodwell, his partner Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy, and Linda Rhodes proposed an annual march to be held in New York City by way of a resolution at the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations meeting in Philadelphia.

We propose that a demonstration be held annually on the last Saturday in June in New York City to commemorate the 1969 spontaneous demonstrations on Christopher Street and this demonstration be called CHRISTOPHER STREET LIBERATION DAY. No dress or age regulations shall be made for this demonstration.
We also propose that we contact Homophile organizations throughout the country and suggest that they hold parallel demonstrations on that day. We propose a nationwide show of support.

All attendees to the ERCHO meeting in Philadelphia voted for the march except for Mattachine Society of New York, 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 City 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 organizing committee were Judy Miller, Jack Waluska, Steve Gerrie and Brenda Howard of GLF. 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 committee 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. By 1973, the original Gay Liberation Front disbanded.
Brenda Howard, a bisexual activist, is known as the "Mother of Pride" for her work in coordinating the march, and she also originated the idea for a week-long series of events around Pride Day which became the genesis of the annual LGBT Pride celebrations that are now held around the world every June. Additionally, Howard along with the bisexual activist Robert A. Martin and gay activist L. Craig Schoonmaker are credited with popularizing the word "Pride" to describe these festivities. Bisexual activist Tom Limoncelli later stated, "The next time someone asks you why LGBT Pride marches exist or why Pride Month is June tell them 'A bisexual woman named Brenda Howard thought it should be.'"
Christopher Street Liberation Day on June 28, 1970 marked the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots with a march from Sheridan Square, covering the 51 blocks to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. The march took less than half the scheduled time due to excitement, but also due to wariness about walking through the city with gay banners and signs. Although the parade permit was delivered only two hours before the start of the march, participants encountered little resistance from onlookers. The New York Times reported that the march extended for about 15 city blocks. Reporting by The Village Voice was positive, describing "the out-front resistance that grew out of the police raid on the Stonewall Inn one year ago". There was also an assembly on Christopher Street.

Organizers

The first March in 1970 was organized by the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee. Since 1984 the parade and related LGBT pride events in New York City have been produced and organized by Heritage of Pride, a volunteer spearheaded, non-partisan, tax-exempt, non-profit organization. HOP welcomes participation regardless of age, creed, gender, gender identification, HIV status, national origin, physical, mental or developmental ability, race, or religion. HOP does not use qualifiers for participation.

Broadcast

After many years where NY1 broadcast the March locally to Time Warner customers, in 2017 WABC-TV broadcast the NYC LGBT Pride March live for the first time regionally and made the stream available to all parts of the globe where such content is accessible. WABC7 continues to broadcast the first three hours of each years March. Both the 2017 and 2018 broadcasts were Emmy nominated programs.

Schisms

Over the course of five decades, various groups have accused the NYC Pride March of losing its political, activist roots and becoming a venue for corporate pinkwashing, rainbow capitalism, and assimilation of queer identities. Such critiques have given rise to various independent events conducted without permits or police. The Dyke March has been held annually since 1993 on the Saturday prior. Since 1994 the New York City Drag March has been held annually on the Friday prior; it began as a protest against the ban on leather and drag during the 25th anniversary of Stonewall. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Stonewall in 2019, the Reclaim Pride Coalition held a Queer Liberation March on Sunday morning hours before the NYC Pride March.

Size

The first march, in 1970, was front-page news in The New York Times reporting the march extended for about fifteen city blocks. The march had thousands of participants with organizers “who said variously 3,000 and 5,000 and even 20,000.” The variance could be due, in part, that although the march started with over a dozen homosexual and feminist contingents, parade spectators were encouraged to join the procession. Currently Heritage of Pride requires preregistration of marchers, and sets up barricades along the entire route discouraging the practice.
Although estimating crowd size is an imprecise science, the NYC March is consistently considered the largest Pride parade in the U.S., with 2.1 million people in 2015, and 2.5 million in 2016. In 2018 attendance was estimated around two million. In 2019, as part of Stonewall 50 - WorldPride NYC, up to five million people took part over the final weekend of the celebrations, with an estimated four million in attendance at the parade. The twelve-hour parade included 150,000 pre-registered participants among 695 groups. It was the largest parade of any kind in the city's history and four times as large as the annual Times Square Ball on New Year's Eve.

Grand Marshals

2019

2009 marked the occasion of the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City. Accordingly, HOP in conjunction with NYC local government promoted the event for people from around the world to attend. Grand Marshals that year were: