The political storm clouds aren’t just gathering from afar. Minutes before marchers in the PHL Pride Festival embarked on a two-hour route through Center City under a cloudless sky, Dominic Bey, 24, stood in a Deadpool T-shirt and rainbow wristbands on a lawn near the Independence Visitor Center, and expressed gratitude for the gathering. “There are an awful lot of gay people,” one marcher said that day, “who feel alone.”įifty years later, a rainbow-streaked sea of thousands pooled in front of the National Constitution Center on Sunday to remember past struggles, celebrate the LGBTQ community’s diversity and success, and steel themselves for growing political attacks that threaten to unravel hard-won rights. Some dropped masks and chains into coffins, symbolically shedding the guilt and shame they’d been taught to carry for simply being who they were. On a cool, overcast Sunday in June 1972, a crowd of 2,500 or so people met at Rittenhouse Square, and trudged across Chestnut Street toward Independence Hall - the tentative first steps of the city’s first gay pride parade.
