Pride parades are increasingly becoming global phenomenons, popping up in small rural towns and unexpected exotic locales all over the world. Six cities, however, take the cake for hosting the most colorful Pride parades, attracting millions of travelers to celebrate under their picture-perfect rainbow.
Tel Aviv Pride culminates with a dance party by the beach, Toronto is getting ready to host World Pride in 2014, Sao Paulo Pride attracts more visitors than the Pope, San Francisco hosts one of the largest celebrations in the U.S., Amsterdam‘s Pride parade takes over the city’s famed canals and in Madrid, Pride is a city-wide festival. Which of these destinations deserves the 2013 title of “Utopian Pride”?
Vote now for your favorite city in Best of GayCities 2013. You can vote everyday until Sunday, January 19. Each time you do, you increase your chances to win a trip for two courtesy of American Airlines.
Photo: Flickr
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
imperator
After going to Toronto Pride in 2011 and 2012, my bf and I took this year off, stayed closer to home so we’d be less cash-strapped come World Pride in 2014. Made our reservations a couple weeks ago, though, to go for the last 4 days and see the big gay world converge on Church & Wellesley 🙂
jonjct
we were in amsterdam for pride a few years ago. during the event we toured the anne frank house, confetti from the parade slipped in the windows. i told my daughter that 70 years ago nobody would believe this. oh my, how times have changed. let’s count our blessings.
jimbryant
Oh, please, these parades are awful. What’s there to be proud of? A man wearing lipstick? Puh-lease.
What you have here is a bunch of men who couldn’t care less about gay rights. What they really want is the right to wear Spandex and platform shoes just before a night out at a club where they can shake their faux-uteruses to a Britney song. You call this progress? I don’t.
Gay rights has been taken over by fakes. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Degas
jimbryant, you really are a curmudgeon!
imperator
@jimbryant: The advancement of gay rights *absolutely depends* on the principle of individuals’ freedom– freedom to transgress “norms,” freedom to publicly flout sexist gender conventions, freedom to be unashamedly sensual, freedom to be flamboyant or outrageous or whatever– freedom for each and every one of us to have whatever we define as “fun” so long as it doesn’t harm anybody. That’s the spiritual core of modern “Pride”: by refusing for an hour or a day or a week to conform to standards of propriety established by prudes, and refusing to repress our exuberance, we declare that the liberties of all must be respected equally. We demand to be allowed to have fun, per our own definition, and as long as it isn’t injurious to anybody we demand (reasonably) the squeamish and the puritanical learn to *get over it.* To suck it up. By marginalizing their minority objections (however vocal that minority), we expand the frontiers of freedom of self-expression for *everyone* else. And yes, that’s something to be proud of. Claiming the freedom to take to the streets and declare ourselves, in all of our diverse truths, IS progress.
You might call that people being a bunch of “fakes;” I suspect those same people would regard you as a joyless, repressed sell-out, or a witless cog in the machine that god-fearing assholes designed to grind everyone down to live just like them. But I can’t authoritatively brand you as such– only you know for certain why you’re so fucking opposed to other people having a good time.
Mezaien
If the USA was safe to gay as Israel, thing would have been a lot more Honky Dore for us in the USA.