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Sir Ian McKellan and Mayor Ken Livingstone joined the crowds during London's gay pride parade (the last and biggest stop of EuroPride 2006) — but we know you're more interested in seeing the floats, the signs, and of course, the mens. While this year's attendance of 40,000 didn't meant organizers' expections of 500,000 – a huge number expected because the event didn't conflict with the World Cup; last year's coincidided with the Live 8 concert but still drew 250,000 – the event has been labeled a success: no major brawls between the crowds and police, and protestors were all but ignored.

Gay Pride comes to London [Reuters]

Ask and ye shall receive! Toronto blogger Donald provided us with some great photos from Saturday's Dyke March, which we had hoped to attend, but ended up missing. It looks pretty much like we expected it to be: naked boobs everywhere. See them all after the jump.

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It was a perfect day on Sunday for Toronto Pride, which, with an estimated 1.2 million attendees, was the largest Pride celebration in Canada and one of the largest in North America. The parade down Yonge St. had a nice mix of colorful queens, community groups, shirtless guys of all shapes and sizes, and lots of house and dance hall beats. And let's not forget the Super Soakers. We managed to protect our camera from the water gun toters long enough to snap some photos of the parade, which you can check out after the jump.

We also wandered around the festival along Church St. (the Toronto Gay Village) and saw some interesting characters, including some gay mounties. We're sorry we missed the Dyke Parade on Saturday, but we were still nursing a hangover from Friday night. If anybody has photos, please send them in!

Our day ended at Big Primpin's "Get Busted" party at the Courthouse, where we danced away every last drop of energy that hadn't been sapped by sun, beer gardens, and crazy queens.

Hundreds of thousands turn out for Toronto's Pride Parade [CBC]

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• Marc Jacobs seems to be back with rent-a-boyfriend Jason Preston, at least for now. The twosome were spotted at Therapy in New York with, of all people, porn star maestro Michael Lucas. [Page Six]

• When it comes to celebs coming out of the closet, Jake Gyllenhaal and Vin Diesel are, not surprisingly, at the top of the list of gambling odds. [Gambling 911]

• Jennifer Lopez made good on rumors she'd be the surprise guest at Dance On The Pier. [Perez Hilton]

Just because you didn't see your city here doesn't mean you're not on our radar. But we can't have all the fun in covering gay pride around the world, can we? Some selected links to our Web friends who are delivering plenty of visuals.

• Seattle: Queer Beacon

• Atlanta: extraspecial/Flickr

• San Diego: Flickr

• San Francisco: Searching for Mr. Chess

• Paris: Oh La La Paris

Did we miss your city? Clue us in on where we can find coverage in the comments!

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Much love to Queerty's spankalicious reader Art for sending in photos from Rhode Island's gay pride event!

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Thanks to Queerty all-star Michael, who sent in the photos in the above clip from Detroit's gay pride. Motor City queers out too, ya'll.

If there was ever an unofficial grand marshall of New York City's Gay Pride Parade this year, it was Kevin Aviance. New York's storied drag queen – gay bashed earlier this month – made a grand public appearance atop HX magazine's float, showing no signs of victim — just pride.

If ever there were a more appropriate time to use this tired cliche, it's today — while reporting on the unfortunate thunderstorms that brought Atlanta's Gay Pride Parade to an early end. Officials called off the event midway through the afternoon when the weather turned for the worse, marking the second time in three years the parade got axed before the grand finale of Starlight Cabaret, a giant drag show. (Waterproof mascara only goes so far.) But Sunday's main event wasn't the only rained out celebration.

This year's festival was plagued by storms on all three days. The most serious event occurred on Friday, when strong winds caused Pride's main stage to collapse shortly after the opening ceremonies. Pride officials cancelled the evening's performers and all other activities in Piedmont Park, with the exception of the Pride Prom, an event for gay youth held in Magnolia Hall, a building within the park.

The Pride marketplace and the event's second stage opened as scheduled on Saturday morning. A smaller stage erected to replace the main stage resumed performances late Saturday afternoon.

But Saturday night's entertainment was cut short due to thunderstorms before the final act, which was scheduled to be lesbian songwriter Melissa Ferrick.

Sunday's parade stepped off from the Civic Center MARTA stage under darkening skies just after 1 p.m. The storm clouds burst around 2:20 p.m., and parade participants and spectators were periodically drenched throughout the two-hour procession by heavy rains.

The crowd responded to each crash of thunder with loud applause. The thunderstorms were almost perfectly synchronized with the parade passing by the most crowded part of the route near 10th Street and Piedmont Avenue.

Gay Pride events canceled after parade [Southern Voice]

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Thanks to Queerty cage slave Richard, who sent in the above footage from Columbus, Ohio's gay pride parade. After the jump, check out a few more videos (and photos) from the Midwest celebrations!

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It's been one hell of a month celebrating gay pride, whether it was this weekend here in New York, across the country in L.A., or anywhere in between. We'll be coming at you all day with gay pride photo and video updates all submitted by your fellow Queerty readers. Up first is our own account of New York City's gay pride parade, which was the coolest (when it came to temperature) we'd ever been to. Our favorite marching troop all afternoon: the gay men and women of the NYPD and FDNY.

After the jump, a photo montage with pictures submitted by Queerty love child "Boss Tweed" and other contributors.

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While we'll likely be out in full force here in New York to help celebrate Gay Pride, we want you, our faithful readers, to help us in covering it! We want your photos and video clips – whether delivered via Flickr, YouTube, or email – of your gay pride experience, whether it's in New York or elsewhere.

What do you get in return? Free T-shirts, of course! And not just any T-shirt, but one of those much sought after "gay? fine my me" tees from our friends at FineByMe.org, an equal rights advocacy group helping gay men and women come out and be proud of their identity. They retail for $20 (plus shipping), so just think of the savings!

We'll randomly select among all submissions and distrbute as many tees as we've got (about 10 or so).

When submitting, please include your name and mailing address, as well as your size and color preference. (We've got small, medium, and large in black, blue, green, and, of course, orange.) Send away to holla@queerty.com.

Sadly, this is the only video evidence we have of Rhode Island gay pride. Surely some of you out there have better, more flattering footage?

This year's Gay Games in Chicago are shaping up to filled not only with headline acts – Andy Bell, Cindi Lauper, Margaret Cho, Megan Mullally – but some headline advertisers, as well. Both ESPN and Gatorade have signed on as official sponsors, joining the likes of Kraft and Walgreens in the face of plenty of right-wing groups calling for boycotts of these companies. (Keep in mind Kraft is owned by Altria, which owns Phillip Morris, which make Marlboro cigarettes. How many conservatives do you picture switching to Camel?)

We've been hammered with press releases from corporate sponsors of gay pride events for weeks now — Svedka vodka, for instance wants to make sure Queerty readers know drag queen empresaria Lady Bunny is Madame President in 2033, or at least she'll play her on the Svedka float during NYC pride.

Do we get the warm and fuzzies when big companies embrace the GLBT community? Sure. Are we more likely to buy their products if they actively target our demographic? Most likely. Are we losing some of our gay pride purpose by letting corporations attach themselves to our community efforts? Probably.

Gay Games add sponsors [Chicago RedEye]

As Gay Pride Month continues worldwide, The Advocate has a timely piece examining what purpose these these celebrations serve. In this era, are parades just a chance for Showtime to market The L Word and protesters to throw around Biblical scripture? Or do they still represent the coming togetherness of a community that has fought for so long to be accepted by society?

For today's youth (of which I include myself), it's easy to forget that the floats down New York's Fifth Avenue and Hollywood's Santa Monica Boulevard are a very recent phenomenon. The furor over Moscow's banning gay pride celebrations and Poland's mixed acceptance only underscores the point that public displays of cultural identification are more than media spectacle: they're integral to our brother and sisterhood. Leave it to a public relations maestro to fully grasp the notion. Writes Howard Bragman:

You can’t discuss the public implications of gay pride without understanding a historical perspective. Thirty years ago, when these celebrations were in their infancy, our community was invisible. I repeat, invisible. Mainstream news organizations did not cover our community; our civil rights struggles had no legitimacy; and if we were covered, it usually focused on negative or stereotypical images.

The gay pride parades were our moment. Our earliest pioneers stood in public and said, “I’m here, I’m queer, get used to it.” While that wasn’t the language they used, necessarily, it was certainly the spirit in which the parades were presented. [...]

We have grown and matured as a community, and our parades now present a much more diverse cross section of our population. But at the beginning it was the few and the proud, and all of us should be deeply indebted to those who talked the talk and walked the walk. Without their efforts, we would not be where we are today.

The second point I need to make is that gay pride celebrations were not created for the media. They were created for us. They bring us together in droves, and they inspire a sense of community. No one can go to a gay pride parade and not be amazed at the numbers and the diversity of our people and not feel a sense of kinship and community.

Why pride matters [Advocate]