Pride on parade in New York City with a nod to history, new challenges

A call to action “against the forces that do not want us to exist” is the theme underpinning this weekend's celebration in Manhattan marking 55 years since the riots that catalyzed the modern gay rights movement.

Festivities kickoff at noon Saturday with a “Youth Pride” gathering at the South Street Seaport Museum and continue Sunday with the centerpiece of what has become an annual LGBTQIA festival — the NYC Pride March, which starts at 11 a.m. at 25th Street and Fifth Avenue and, except for during the peak of COVID-19 pandemic, is typically attended by tens of thousands.

On its website, Heritage of Pride, the event organizer, touts 40 years of overseeing the event, urging revelers to “Reflect. Empower. Unite” to fend off “forces that do not want us to exist.”

For Tawni Engel, who runs the LGBTQIA+-focused group PFY at the Bellmore- and Deer Park-based Long Island Crisis Center, the call for more involvement and coming together “is a really great message.”

“Our theme for our annual Pride fundraising gala was ‘Power of Pride,’ ” said Engel, who is also an associate executive director at the center. “The message that we try to drive home is that we're empowering people and coming together.”

NYPD Det. Brian Downey, president of the Gay Officers Action League, said he came out during the 2009 city Pride March in his dress blues.

“Marching in a police uniform in front of a lot of people, to me, was a great message to society that we exist and we're not going anywhere,” Downey told Newsday, “whether it be in the medical profession, education, law enforcement profession, we're here.”

Police officers have been barred from marching in past years, several times due to controversy over police brutality during the summer of 2020 amid protests over the killing that spring of George Floyd. The ban persists.

Downey said his organization, abbreviated as GOAL, will hold a separate Pride event.

The world hasn't always been so accepting, said David Kilmnick, founder and president of the Hauppauge-based LGBT Network.

“We actually had to go to court to win the right to march,” Kilmnick said of the annual Long Island Pride Parade. “We were not allowed to have a parade where we could just be ourselves.”

Earlier this month, the parade in Huntington celebrated 34 years and had as its grand marshal Suffolk police Det. Sgt. Tamika Mays, a 14-year veteran of the force and president of its LGBTQ Society.

“I've been to New York City Pride many times,” Kilmnick said, “but to me, celebrating pride where I live is the most important to me.”

This year also marks the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall riots of 1969, when an NYPD police raid at The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, ignited unrest that lasted for days.

The uproar marked a pivotal moment in gay and lesbian history, leading to the start of the modern LGBTQIA rights movement. On June 27, 1970, a year after Stonewall, the city's first gay pride march was held by the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee in remembrance of the riots.

After the committee disbanded in 1984, the Heritage of Pride was founded the same year to continue the festivities.

“So many people, young people in particular, have no idea that it's actually a commemoration, it’s just an annual celebration,” said Jay Shockley of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.

With Matthew Chayes