As thousands gather in New York, San Francisco and dozens of other cities around the world to celebrate Gay Pride this summer, a small but growing number of activists are saying the gay community should take no pride in the events themselves.

What began four years ago as a small protest gathering in Brooklyn has grown to become an undeniable -- if not exactly coordinated -- backlash against the growing presence, and importance, of corporate sponsors at Gay Pride events. Alternative 'Gay Shame' events are being held in dozens of cities. The common theme: Corporate sponorship is leading to the crass commercialization of the pride movement.

Held in late June every year, New York's pride march commemorates the 1969 Stonewall riots, three nights of violent street protests during which hundreds of gay and lesbian New Yorkers demanded an end to decades of police harassment. Over the years, however, the protest march has become a parade, the events surrounding it a rollicking, colorful, multi-day celebration of contemporary gay culture. Increasingly, that celebration has been underwritten by corporate advertisers eager to reach gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender consumers.

Organizers of pride events in New York and other cities say the evolution is natural, reflecting the changing nature of the gay community. "It's an evolving event. Is it changing? Yes it is," says David Schnider, media director for New York City Heritage of Pride, the volunteer group which organizes the city's PrideFest events. "It's probably changing to reflect how our community is doing."

For some members of that community, however, the changes have gone too far. In 1998, objecting to the increased prominence of corporate sponsors and the diminished profile of political activism at the New York event, a group of gay rights activists decided to create a forum for their frustrations. The group staged Gay Shame, held on the same weekend as the pride events and billed as an alternative venue for those who felt alienated by the larger celebration.

Gay shame is a movement whose adherents describe it as a radical alternative to the gay mainstream.

Gay shame was created and named in opposition and protest to the overcommercialization of the "gay pride" events, and its members attack "queer assimilation" in what they perceive as oppressive and conservative societal structures -- as such its members disagree with the legalization of same-sex marriage. Gay Shame began in 1998 as an annual event in Brooklyn, New York, and later spread to San Francisco and Toronto. The San Francisco Gay Shame became a non-hierarchical direct-action group that continues to this day. Swallow Your Pride was a zine published by the people involved in planning Gay Shame in New York. Three issues were released.

"In the beverage world, liquor companies have always understood this and marketed to this niche," remarks Gay. "Absolut Vodka led the way by buying the back cover in gay and lesbian magazines. Stolichnaya is another major player, Skyy Vodka participates by pouring its product at events. Tanqueray is the major support behind the AIDS Bike Rides held around the U.S. Other spirits producers are also advertising leaders: Johnny Walker, Hennessy, Bombay Sapphire, Bailey's, Miller Beer, Budweiser, and Mumm.

For 32 years the festival was held on Capitol Hill, the center of Seattle's gay community. But with crowds exceeding 200,000 the decision was made last year to move to Seattle Center.

That raised the cost and Out and Proud still owes the city more than $102,000 for last year.

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But many in the community say they aren't surprised by the financial problems.

Last year many of them boycotted the official Pride event for a parade and festival on Capitol Hill called Queerfest that was organized by the LGBT Community Center.

The Center said Tuesday it is ready to hold Queerfest again to keep the Pride spirit alive. When it heard of Out and Proud's financial problems it obtained a city license to hold a festal on June 23.

Looks like Pride will not be at the Seattle Center this year. I am really disappointed in the Pride organizers Seattle Out and Proud. I have a hard time understanding why they have to be the face of Seattle Pride. I don't remember voting them in to represent me and my friends. Can someone please explain to me how it is they came to control Pride?

Something we don't see in Seattle: Activists proud of their "Gayborhood"

Here in Seattle, the activists who claim to own the name "Seattle Pride" have proudly stated for years that they've grown up and moved beyond our town's gay neighborhoods. Seattle's annual gay pride parade was moved off of Broadway on Capitol Hill and now marches through a multi-decade construction zone on Fourth Avenue downtown, following roughly the same route in reverse as the town's wonderfully tacky Seafair Torchlight Parade.

$121: The total amount of donations the organizers of 2006 Seattle Pride took in during its namesake weekend. $100,000: The unpaid facilities bill for the group's use of Seattle Center, the first year the festival happened outside the Capitol Hill neighborhood and gay community. Slim to none: The chances that 2007 Seattle Pride will happen.

Organizers announced Wednesday morning that Seattle Out and Proud, the group that coordinated last year's Seattle Center celebration, doesn't plan to file for bankruptcy.

"The Seattle Pride Parade will be produced as planned by Seattle Out and Proud," a statement on the group's Web site read. "Due to overwhelming support in light of a recent press release, we will move forward with our plans to produce the parade down 4th Avenue on Sunday, June 24, 2007."

At a meeting last night, Seattle Out and Proud's board decided that producing a festival would not be financially possible.

On Tuesday, the group announced it would file for bankruptcy and disband due to a $102,000 debt owed to the Seattle Center for last year's weekend-long event. The Seattle Center had agreed to allow the event to proceed again this year if the group paid half the debt up-front and then paid $25,000 every year for two years.

The debt has been referred to the city's legal department, a Seattle Center spokesman said Tuesday.

But now, an outpouring of financial support following the group's bankruptcy claims has apparently made it possible to pay that debt and hold the traditional Seattle Pride parade.

(Seattle, Washington) Within hours of Tuesday's announcement that Seattle's Out and Proud - the volunteer group that puts on the city's annual gay pride parade and festival - was filing for bankruptcy and canceling this year's event, the organization's phones began ringing.

The city's gay community was rallying to the cause. By the end of the night enough money had come in to pay off the group's $102,000 debt from last year's parade and save the organization from bankruptcy.

New York now has seven different Pride celebrations commencing at the beginning of June and ending in the middle of August. It seems fracture and splintership is the way of all LGBT movements.

The only memorable parade I've witnessed (and I don't get out much) involved three divisions. There were tanks and trucks, there were planes flying over head, there were several thousand guys (cute ones, mostly) with guns in the most astonishingly regular blocks. The sound was incredible.

This topic brings me to the worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in fours to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism-- how passionately I hate them! How vile and despicable seems war to me! I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. My opinion of the human race is high enough that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the peoples not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds -- it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. Neither can I, nor would I want to, conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or from sheer egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

If a Pride parade can do that, I'd certainly go... it'd be a hoot. It can't though. I do not care for chaotic mobs aimlessly moving from point A to point B. This is why I do not go to such things.

I can't help getting a mental image of you in a big fuzzy winter hat, standing with the rest of the Gay Politbureau atop Harvey Milk's Tomb, reviewing the troops, Fer. *hee hee*

There comes a point, in the arc of every minority group's successful fight for acceptance, when the worst seems behind them and the question becomes whether to integrate or remain separate. When the Seattle Out and Proud Committee announced last year that it was moving the parade from Capitol Hill to downtown, it steered its rickety nonprofit organization right into the center of this debate and, as we are now seeing, barely survived. Roughly put: Downtown Pride Parade supporters back integration; Capitol Hill Pride Parade supporters back separation. It's Mainstream Sensibility vs. Ghetto Mentality.

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Just as a flawed and floundering Pride celebration promotes a downward spiral of insider recriminations and general disinterest, so an improving Pride celebration would promote a greater sense of gay community. Who cares about fostering a greater sense of gay community through parades and parties, especially in an era that some call "post-gay" or even "post-post-gay"? Well, maybe a certain type of person who is out, proud, over it, and fine on his or her own doesn't care much (though this ability not to care much comes thanks, in no small measure, to countless gay parades that have come before). But here's who definitely does care: The streams of young, semi-out, and semi-confident gays who pour into Seattle over Pride weekend each summer. The better the celebration, the better for them, and the better for them, the better the future for gays and lesbians.

Around 20 activists attempted to march for gay rights in the Moldovan capital Chisinau last week. People threw eggs and shouted homophobic abuse at the gay Pride marchers, and the police stopped them from laying flowers at the Monument to the Victims of Repression.

A government committee had banned the march on the grounds that it could pose a public disorder threat, that it would promote sexual propaganda and that it would undermine Moldovan Christian values. The decision was despite the ruling of the Moldovan Supreme Court last December that a previous ban on the LGBT Pride march was illegal.

It was the third year in a row that Moldovan authorities have banned the gay Pride march in the capital.

The largest gay pride festival on the African continent will be held on October 6th on the streets of Johannesburg, it was revealed today.

A street parade, with the theme “Coming of Age”, will be followed by a Mardi Gras at the Zoo Lake Sports Club on Rosebank. It will be a week of celebrations, with the days before the parade including an art exhibition, a cabaret show, fund-raising and theatre events, along with something called “real drag” racing.

[...]

A number of fringe events, such as nightclub parties, will also take place around the city and across Gauteng during Pride week.

The Mayor of Warsaw has rejected calls from the youth wing of a government party to ban a gay Pride parade in the city tomorrow.

The Catholic Youth Movement, who are affiliated with the Polish League of Families, had demanded that she stop the gay event, claiming it posed a threat to morality.

Hanna Gronkiewicz Walz told Polish radio that any ban would contradict the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.

Earlier this month the Strasbourg-based court ruled that the ban on the 2005 Pride event in Warsaw was a violation of human rights. The seven judges, including one from Poland, were unanimous.

The ECHR agreed that freedom of association and assembly, prohibition of discrimination and the right to an effective remedy had been denied, all of which are guaranteed in the European Convention on Human Rights.

In 1993, 5,000 people came to the Montreal Pride parade. By 2003, the number had exceeded one million. But there will be no 2007 Pride parade in Montreal, evidently because of issues of cost and political infighting.

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The web site Hour.ca reported May 17 that earlier this year, Célébration de la Fierté had taken over organizing duties when Divers/Cité, the previous group behind the parade, saw a report that showed one quarter of parade spectators do not go to the rest of the Gay Pride festival, while just over three quarters of the festival-goers bypassed the parade. Given the cost of mounting the parade, and also in the wake of protracted tensions with community organizations and Gay Village shop owners.

The shop owners reportedly wanted more input, and more profit-sharing, in the parade. Rather than continue to deal with their demands and shell out the money needed for parade logistics when so many festival attendees did not even watch, Divers/Cité decided against a parade this year.

Montreal will have a gay pride parade this year, despite behind-the-scenes organizational problems that nearly canned it, the head of the Quebec Gay Chamber of Commerce promised yesterday.

A daytime parade is being planned for the last weekend in July, probably Sunday, July 29, said Pierre Paquette, the chamber's managing director.

A new coalition of groups representing the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered communities is now in charge of the parade, Paquette said.

The coalition includes groups like the Gay Chamber of Commerce, sports teams, Ville Marie borough representatives and organizers of the annual Black & Blue Party, he noted.