Marchers cap Pride Month with celebration and protest : NPR

At Pride parades from New York City to Budapest over the weekend, communities around the world celebrated and also demonstrated for LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion during the last days of Pride Month. In addition to waving rainbow flags, many held protest signs, amid increasing political attacks in the U.S. by Republicans and President Trump’s administration.

“Our joy is our resistance,” read one sign held by a reveler wearing samba feathers at New York City’s Pride parade, the oldest and largest such event in the U.S. This year, the New York event’s theme was “Rise Up: Pride in Protest.”

Large throngs of New Yorkers celebrated as the parade traveled down Fifth Avenue to downtown. Many of them also demonstrated against President Trump’s recent executive orders and policies targeting transgender people and recognizing only two unchangeable sexes, male and female. Trump’s orders have also banned “gender ideology” and dismantled diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“At a time when trans youth are under attack, queer art is being erased, and the clock is being rolled back on LGBTQIA+ rights across the country … NYC Pride remains focused on advocating for our community as we face an onslaught of attacks,” NYC Pride media director Chris Piedmont wrote in a statement posted on social media.

The celebrations occurred even as some corporations canceled or cut back donations to Pride events around the country this year.

For the fifth year in a row, New York Police Department and corrections officers were officially barred from marching in the parade while wearing their full dress uniforms, which include firearms. On the sidelines of the parade, New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch joined members of the Gay Officers Action League New York to protest the exclusion.

The New York event also commemorated the legacy of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, when a violent police raid at a gay bar in Greenwich Village sparked the beginning of a national movement for LGBTQ+ rights. The parade marched past the Stonewall Inn, now a national monument.

Ten years after the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in the U.S., there were also major Pride parades in San Francisco, West Hollywood, Chicago, Denver, Seattle and Minneapolis.

“Especially this year with everything going on, I think it’s really important to show force and show our support,” Angela Loudermilk told NPR member station KQED at the San Francisco parade, which she rode in with her motorcycle club.

Other cities around the world, including Tokyo, Paris and São Paulo, held their events earlier this month. And some, including London and Rio de Janeiro, will celebrate later this year.

At a Pride event in Budapest on Saturday, around 100,000 people marched in defiance of police orders and a ban by the Hungarian government.

In April, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s conservative populist governing party outlawed LGBTQ+ public events, saying they violated children’s rights to moral and spiritual development. It was the latest Hungarian crackdown after banning same-sex marriage and adoption, and outlawing transgender people from changing their sex in official documents.

Ádám Kanicsár, a 35-year-old Hungarian LGBTQ+ activist and journalist, told The Associated Press he and others were defying the ban. “We don’t really care about the consequences, we are here because we are proud.”