“It was clear we were just hitting our heads against a wall,” said Ann Northrop, one of Reclaim’s organizers and a longtime activist. They initially tried to work within Heritage of Pride, pushing to reduce the police presence at the march and to get rid of corporate floats. Many of Reclaim’s organizers were veterans of ACT UP or other protest groups, reinvigorated after the election of Donald J. She heard about a group called the Reclaim Pride Coalition, which had formed a few years earlier in frustration over what the Pride march - originally a protest against police harassment - had become. My first Pride march was so exciting, but what are we actually doing?” So I could see the Heritage of Pride parade as this thing for white gay men, muscly, in glitter. “We didn’t have job protections,” she said. At the Pride march in 2018, her second, she recalled seeing all the corporate floats and the stores with rainbow flags and thinking, This doesn’t feel real. Let’s talk more when you get home.”įrancesca Barjon, 25, who is Black and bisexual, did not see herself in these stories. After they hung up, his father called back and said: “Have fun today. “It was a whole other experience of love and light and excitement.” On a rooftop at the end of the day, after some drinks, he called home and told his father that he was gay. “It was like the whole world opened up to me,” he said. When a friend dragged him into Manhattan for Pride, an hour-plus subway ride, he expected brunch and a little parade. Michael Donahue was 25 and living with his parents in the Rockaway section of Queens in 2005, not fully open about his sexual orientation. Stories about Pride - and there must be millions of them - often go something like this. How did a celebration that delights millions of people create so much rancor and mistrust? “We’re at a pivotal moment where we either come back, or people will look elsewhere.”įor Heritage of Pride, which just two years ago staged the biggest march in its history, with five million spectators attending, it was a stunning turn. “This is the worst that I’ve ever seen it,” said Maria Colón, a longtime Heritage of Pride member and former board member.