When Gay Pride Day Takes Two Weeks
MADRID | As happens with many Spanish celebrations, Gay Pride “Day” has rather miraculously been stretched out into nearly two weeks of parties, performances, parades, rallies, exhibitions, conferences, and lots and lots of late-night festivities. When I arrived here from New York City nearly seven years ago, Orgullo, as the festival is known, was already a five-day extravaganza bursting at the seams with events and activities and non-stop socializing from which the city’s citizenry — gay, straight and undecided — often needed about five days to recover.
But Madrid has recently begun pushing the envelope even further by scheduling its pride parade a week after the typical last-weekend-in-June date respected almost everywhere else around the globe. By ceding this Saturday, June 27, to Spain’s provincial capitals for their local pride celebrations, Madrid now guarantees that all of Spain will be free to attend its parade and parties on the following Saturday, this year on July 4.
And indeed, attendance in recent years has reportedly topped 2 million, making Madrid’s Orgullo festivities likely the largest party in Europe of any stripe for four years running.
Which is not to say that this weekend, as the parades and parties are getting under way in other cities and towns across the country from Barcelona to Tenerife, that gay Madrid will staying in and resting up.
See When Gay Pride Day Takes Two Weeks
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/when-gay-prid…
Gay pride activists march in Rome, Warsaw, Zagreb
(Rome) Tens of thousands of gay rights activists demanding rights for same-sex couples marched through the streets of Rome on Saturday in a gay pride parade.
Smaller marches wound through the capitals of heavily Catholic Poland and in Croatia, where counterdemonstrators shouted anti-gay and nationalist slogans.
In Rome, costumed demonstrators carrying rainbow …
Tags: Capitals, Croatia, Demonstrators, Gay Pride Parade, Gay Rights Activists, Gay Rome, Marches, Poland, Rainbow, Same Sex Couples, Slogans, Streets Of Rome, Tens Of Thousands, Warsaw, Zagreb Rome
