The city’s police commissioner called it an anti-gay hate crime.Ī. In one case last month, police said a gunman used homophobic slurs before firing a fatal shot into a man’s face on a Manhattan street alive with a weekend midnight crowd. “I have seen more real progress in the past three years than the nearly two decades of activism before it.”īut, she added, “we must remain vigilant hate crimes, discrimination and family rejection loom in our lives still.”Ī spate of recent hate crimes in New York provide a stark reminder of work left to be done. “It is an especially thrilling year to march this year,” she said. Longtime LGBT activist Cathy Renna said Windsor’s suit and the Supreme Court’s favorable ruling in a challenge to Proposition 8, the California gay marriage ban, made this year’s celebration special. Half of one couple carried a sign reading “Just Married Today” while the other tossed flowers into the crowd.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg joined hundreds of bikers whose motorcycles roared to life at noon to kick off the celebration, a colorful cavalcade of activists and others who marched down Fifth Avenue 44 years after the city’s first pride march.Ī color guard, a cadre of gay police officers and longtime couples all took part in the procession on a route where a rainbow of balloons arched overhead.
