New York City Gay Pride Parade
What an amazing weekend!
With the passing of Gay marriage for the state of New York, people celebrated with rainbow flags waving and throbbing dance music blaring, as many as 6,000 marchers in Manhattan’s annual Gay Pride parade celebrated this past weekend.
Cuomo led elected officials at the parade, including Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the body’s first openly gay leader.
The parade stretched almost two miles (3.2 kilometers) from midtown to Greenwich Village and past the Stonewall Inn, where a 1969 police raid spawned the gay-rights movement. Participants were dressed in everything from feathers and glitter to almost nothing at all, and held signs reading “Thank You Governor Cuomo.” About 2 million people watched, up from the typical 1.5 million, said Britton Hogge, media director for Heritage of Pride, the event’s organizer.
Just before the parade began, Cuomo told reporters, “New York has sent a message to this nation, loud and clear. It’s time for marriage equality.” And marchers held signs proclaiming, “Promise Kept!” There was so much joy and excitement in the air this year, it was truly monumental!
As we left our hotel Sunday to come back to Maryland, we got caught up in the crowds watching the city’s Gay Pride Parade. It was quite an experience. The night before, the New York State Assembly had passed, and the governor had signed into law, a bill guaranteeing marriage equality, so the crowd was in especially high spirits. What impressed us the most were the spectators. Lined up five and eight deep along Fifth Avenue was a cross-section of the city’s population cheering on the gay and lesbian marchers, the politicians who had pushed the bill to passage and all the straight participants who marched with them to show support for their gay neighbors, co-workers, friends and family members.
In the crowd along the avenue were old people and young and folks across the ethnic spectrum as well as families and out-of-town tourists like ourselves. What seemed to most invigorate both the marchers and the watchers was a sense that American freedom had once again triumphed, and small-minded bigotry had been pushed further into the past.
An estimated two million people converged on Manhattan Sunday for the gay Pride march, the annual event that took on an “extra special” meaning, in the words of the day’s star attraction, Gov. Andrew Cuomo….
“I think you’re going to see this message resonate all across the country now,” he said. “If New York can do it, it’s OK for every other place to do it. If New York did it, every other place is now going to be posed with the question, and I think that’s a good thing.”
Photos by Andy T. Dickinson
see more of his work at WHAT ANDY ATE BLOG
MORE 2011 PRIDE PHOTOS
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