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How Will You Stay Positive for Pride This Year?
How Do You Celebrate Pride Without Feeling a Little Bit Ashamed?
Why are we always taking one step forward and another step back?
The vaccines had only just come out. There wasn’t enough time to prepare all the usual high-tech festivities, with the mechanical floats and marching bands, so once again, the New York City Pride parade would be cancelled.
Of course, we’d all been fed up with the corporate parade for years. I always hated getting stuck behind police barricades on the sidewalk as floats went by with brand names covered in rainbows they’d shed a few days later.
But we had an alternative — the Queer Liberation March, a grassroots event reclaiming Pride as a political protest. And since the big corporate parade was cancelled in 2021 — the Queer Liberation March was the parade.
We gathered on the steps of Bryant Park. It was cathartic to see so many old familiar faces, even if they were still half-covered at times. We’d all been alone for so long, it meant everything to be able to hug someone again.
