Huge crowds gathered for pride parades in New York, San Francisco, 50 years after Stonewall uprising
LGBTQ-rights advocates and supporters crowded New York City, San Francisco, and other U.S. cities for pride parades on Sunday, celebrating the progress since New York police raided the Stonewall Inn gay bar 50 years ago, sparking the modern gay-rights movement, but also marching against the Trump administration's rollback of transgender rights.
With an estimated 150,000 people marching, 677 groups participating, and hundreds of thousands more watching, New York's Pride Parade was one of the largest ever. It winded past the Stonewall Inn and ended with a concert and celebratory closing ceremony in Times Square on Sunday night. Earlier, a smaller Queer Liberation March followed the route of the inaugural parade in 1970, in partial protest of the commercialization and corporate sponsorship of the Pride March. The New York marches followed the city hosting WorldPride, an international LGBTQ event held in the U.S. for the first time.
Chicago's first openly gay mayor, Lori Lightfoot, was a grand marshal in the Windy City's rain-shortened pride march, and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) marked the occasion by signing an executive order creating a task force to measure how welcoming schools are of transgender students. San Francisco's pride parade temporarily descended into chaos as a handful of marchers protested the large police presence along the parade route.
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For many of the marchers and observers on Sunday, "it was hard to understand just how much prejudice was once directed at gay men, lesbians, and transgender people," The New York Times notes. At the time of the Stonewall upraising on June 28, 1969, "laws in 49 states made gay sex between consenting adults a crime. In New York, it was illegal for two men to dance together until 1971."
