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This Year's L.A. Pride Parade Will Be Replaced By A Resist March
Photo courtesy of L.A. Pride
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Every June, about half-a-million people gather at West Hollywood Park and along Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood for the annual L.A. Pride Parade and Festival. But this year, event organizers have announced that the pride parade (one of the largest in the world) will be replaced by a protest march.
"Christopher Street West (CSW), the non-profit organization responsible for producing the annual LA Pride Parade and Festival in West Hollywood, has taken its New Year’s resolutions seriously," a post on the L.A. Pride website notes. "Today, the CSW Board of Directors is excited to announce a number of important changes to LA Pride in 2017. ...Given the current political climate where divisiveness and discrimination continue to be part of mainstream dialogue, CSW is determined to make the LA Pride brand a unifying force for the LGBTQ+ community and its allies across all of Los Angeles. To accomplish this goal, the organization is introducing several community-focused initiatives to continue LA Pride’s long-standing history as a voice of and for the entire LGBTQ+ community".
According to WeHoville, the annual pride parade will be replaced with the Resist March planned for the same day (June 11). The march route will begin at the Hollywood and Highland subway station in Hollywood, and traverse 3.1 miles of city streets ending at the L.A. Pride festival at West Hollywood Park.
WeHoville adds, "With a quarter-million to a half-million people expected to participate in the march, John Erickson, a Resist March committee member, said they expect to have several simultaneous smaller marches in surrounding areas that feed into the larger march going down Santa Monica Boulevard."
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"We want to see this year's Pride Parade changed to a protest march!" the Facebook page for the event notes. "Floats and marching bands are nice when we are not at war. Now is the time we shake things up and take to the streets. West Hollywood and Los Angeles are always at the forefront of issues. We must be outspoken visable leaders in this fight! Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans/gender diverse, queer, intersex, and asexual-spectrum individuals matter!!!!! People of color matter! Undocumented individuals matter! Women matter!"
“We hope hundreds of thousands of people show up, with this idea of resisting,” Brian Pendleton, one of the Resist March LA organizers, said, reports Queerty. “We want to resist apathy. We want to resist having our rights rolled back by an unenlightened administration. And we want to be all-inclusive. We want to make sure that it’s everyone in the rainbow spectrum out there being represented.”
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