The Queer Liberation March had its roots in the 2017 Pride March, which featured the disruptive début of the Resistance Contingent, a consortium of activist groups that formed in response to the Trump Administration. “It’s really easy for Pride to be a target, because Pride is something that everybody has some sense of ownership in,” Renna said, adding, of the breakout march, “If we’re going to continue to make the kind of progress that we want to make, I think it’s important that we not-I’m trying to think of a way to say this that’s family-friendly-crap on each other, because some people like to do things differently.” This is not about waving a rainbow flag in June in your window.” The Chipotle merch, for example, benefitted the Trevor Project, which provides services to queer youth. They know they gotta do better than that.
“It’s about being able to profit off of us in June.”Ĭathy Renna, a NYC Pride spokesperson, countered, “We’re so far past that with these corporations. “A big part of our issue with the corporations is they’re not consistent in their support for us throughout the year,” Francesca Barjon, the group’s twenty-four-year-old social-media organizer, said.
For instance, Walker mentioned Wells Fargo, which has had floats in Pride marches for years while maintaining ( until recently) financial ties with the National Rifle Association, which opposed gun-control measures after the Pulse night-club shooting, in 2016. “They were kind of sickened by it.” He brought up the concept of pinkwashing, in which “corporate bad actors” use a show of acceptance to buy good will while distracting from less savory practices. “A lot of longtime activists had just stopped going to Pride,” another organizer, Jay W. movement between assimilation and radicalism. The critique that Pride marches have become corporatized and depoliticized has been building for years, part of a perennial tension in the L.G.B.T.Q. The group is now planning a second annual march, which will take place Sunday, while the main Pride March has been cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic-meaning that, by happenstance, the upstart march has usurped the Goliath in the space of a year, just in time to draw on a renewed spirit of spontaneous protest. “One of our mottoes was ‘We’re here for queer liberation, not rainbow capitalism,’ ” one of the organizers, Natalie James, said recently. There were no branded floats, no police contingent, no corporate funding. The new march even re-created the original route, from Greenwich Village up to Central Park. In spirit it was closer to the roots of the Pride March, which was originally called the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, and began, in 1970, to mark the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Chipotle sold limited-edition Pride merch, including tank tops with a rainbow burrito and the slogan “¿Homo Estas?” The hoopla-always big, but this time bigger-marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and culminated in the annual NYC Pride March, which drew some five million revellers and boasted sponsors including MasterCard, Macy’s, Uber, and Diet Coke.Īmid the festivities, a group of activists staged an alternative: the inaugural Queer Liberation March-a smaller, rawer, more radical cousin to the established parade. Last June, the West Village was a labyrinth of rainbows, with every bank branch and Shake Shack festooned with messaging for Pride Month. movement over the corporate embrace of Pride, the question may have crossed your mind. What’s so bad about a rainbow burrito? If you’ve been following the rift in the L.G.B.T.Q.