Stockholm Pride How It All Started
Pride Celebrations for 41 Years
Stockholm Pride is not just any summer festival. For the LGBT-community over the whole world the celebrations of Pride is as much renown and important as feasts like Christmas or New Years Eve.
The celebration of Pride has its origin in the birth of the American gay movement in New York City the 27-29 June 1969. The police was harassing the LGBT-community and 27 June the police made a raid on the gay bar Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street. But for the first time the guests of the bar fought back and started a riot that lasted for three days. Since these riots occurred, celebrations are held across the world to commemorate the turning point of the LGBT-community when we started to fight back against the harassment and so bravely spoke up with pride over their identity and their culture.
Initially the memory was manifested in form of political demonstrations but during the 1980’s the character of these manifestations changed and became more of public festivals. Many big cities, in countries where homosexual love was not a crime, have their own Pride celebrations and in cities like New York, London, Paris, Berlin, San Fransisco, SĂ£o Paulo, Tel Aviv, Bangkok, Taipei and Sydney these events attract hundreds of thousands of participants.
In Sweden, Pride has been celebrated in many different ways and already in 1979 the national LGBT-organisation RFSL organised the first "Homosexual Liberation Week". Since Stockholm was the Capital of Culture in1998 hosting Stockholm EuroPride, it is the independent non-profit organisation Stockholm Pride that organises the festival. RFSL among many other organisations and single individuals are part of the organisation’s members.
The rainbow colours and the rainbow flag is since 1978 the most known international symbol for homosexual solidarity. It was created by the artist Gilbert Baker and originally consisted of eight colours instead of the present six: hot pink, red, orange, Spanish yellow, green, turquoise, indigo and violet. As the flag increased in popularity in the San Franciscos Pride parade, they stopped using hot pink and indigo and turquoise became blue. In The Village in New York, in Soho in London, in the Castro in San Francisco and Santa Monica Blvd in Los Angeles the rainbow flag waves proudly even on the flag poles of local authorities. That is also the situation during Pride here in Stockholm, when the whole city is decorated with the rainbow colours. Naturally the six colours of the rainbow flag are also the colours used for the symbol for Stockholm Pride where they represent our beautiful city’s incredible location spread over islands, always close to water. The symbol for Stockholm Pride was created by Andreas "Andy" Gunnarsson for Stockholm EuroPride 1998.
Pride is not only celebrated in Stockholm. Around the world there are at least another 140 gay pride festivals, parties and carnivals.
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