NYC’s Queer Liberation March may be the most important protest & celebration this year

“No cops, no corps., no BS.” Those are some of the founding principles of the New York-based Reclaim Pride Coalition’s annual Queer Liberation March, in a nutshell.

Each year since the march launched in 2019, an estimated 35­,000–45,000 people have gathered for the annual alternative to the better-known NYC Pride March, the city’s official parade organized by the non-profit organization Heritage of Pride. As Reclaim Pride co-founder Jay Walker recently explained to LGBTQ Nation, the purpose of the Queer Liberation March is to get back to the spirit of resistance that fueled the Stonewall Riot in 1969 and the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march in 1970 by recentering activist organizations, intersectionality, and the politics of the moment while rejecting corporate sponsorships and the involvement of the NYPD.

Related:

Queerty’s Pride50 event hits differently this year as a defiant celebration

At the annual Pride kick-off party, an unprecedented wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation couldn’t dampen the defiantly celebratory mood.

In a year when anti-LGBTQ+ animus—from Republican-backed laws aimed at limiting transgender rights to book bans to hateful rhetoric online—seems to have reached levels not seen in decades, that mission seems more critical than ever.

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The theme of this year’s march, which will take place on Sunday, June 25, beginning with a 2 pm rally in Manhattan’s Foley Square, says it all: “Trans & Queer: Forever Here.” It’s a statement meant to convey the simple fact that despite Republican attempts to silence and erase queer people through legislation, we’ve always been around and we’re not going anywhere.

“Our focus is really on these broad attempts at erasing us,” Walker says of this year’s march. “Erasing our visibility, erasing our history, erasing us from existence in statehouses across the country. That is the real threat.”

The Reclaim Pride Coalition has its roots in what was called the “Resistance Contingent,” itself a coalition of organizations like Rise and Resist and Gays Against Guns that marched in the NYC Pride parade in 2017 and 2018. The group was formed in response to the threat posed to the LGBTQ+ community by the Trump Administration after the 2016 election. But when the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion rolled around in 2019, members of what had come to be known as the Reclaim Pride Coalition became disillusioned with what Walker characterizes as Heritage of Pride’s prioritizing of corporate sponsors and marginalization of activist organizations.

Things were getting bad, Walker says. “The murders of Black trans women particularly. The attacks against the trans community, in general, were really starting to heat up as we got further into the Trump Administration. The Proud Boys were getting bigger, and they were notoriously homophobic. Homophobia and transphobia in social media spaces and online was just being ratcheted up seemingly daily. Attacks on Black and brown queer and trans people by police. All of it,” he recalls. “It felt like a moment to go back to the garden, as I like to put it: get back to what Stonewall was about and what the early Pride marches were about, before corporations discovered our money.”

Over the course of nine months, Walker and his fellow co-founders created the Queer Liberations March, an event anchored in activism and protest that dispensed with many of the bureaucratic barriers that he says define parade models and limit community building amongst different factions of the LGBTQ+ and resistance communities. “You don’t have to pay any entry fee, you don’t have to register, you don’t have to give anybody your name before being allowed to march. You just show up, and if you want to march, you march.”

While Reclaim Pride did obtain a permit from the New York City Parks Department to hold its rally in Central Park and a “handshake agreement” from the NYPD to march that first year, they have proceeded every year since without the involvement of law enforcement. In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the wake of both the death of activist Larry Kramer and the brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, the march went ahead with no communication with the NYPD.

“We were like, ‘No. People power; this is a people’s march,’” Walker says. “We have community marshals keeping everyone safe and blocking intersections as we progress along the march.”

Another aspect of the Queer Liberation March’s mission statement seems particularly relevant this year. Besides accepting money from the M.A.C. AIDS Fund in 2019, Reclaim Pride doesn’t accept corporate sponsorships.

“It is incredibly rare to find a major corporation, especially a bank, that isn’t in some way harming humanity,” Walker explains. “We have to remember that corporations are not sponsoring Pride for the benefit of the community. They’re not. They’re sponsoring them because they want our money. As a collective we have to hold them to account. Accepting their money without demanding improvements, without demanding that they do better by all of humanity, that gives them license to keep on doing business as usual.”

Skepticism of corporate marketing during Pride season and sponsorship of LGBTQ+ events has been building for years, with critics accusing companies of “pinkwashing” or “rainbow washing”—signaling to potential consumers that they support the LGBTQ+ community without taking any meaningful steps to do so. But high-profile controversies involving major national brands in recent months have brought that conversation into even greater relief, exposing the limits of corporate allyship.

Earlier this year, Anheuser-Busch faced calls from conservatives to boycott the beer company after Bud Light partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. The company’s response to the backlash felt to many like a capitulation to anti-LGBTQ+ extremists. Similarly, Target responded to an anti-LGBTQ+ backlash to its 2023 collection of Pride-themed products by minimizing Pride displays in some stores and reportedly refusing to sell certain products.

But while Walker admits that the well-publicized Target and Bud Light debacles may bring the issue of rainbow washing and corporate allyship to light for more people, he doesn’t think that will be top of mind for most of those participating in the Queer Liberation March this weekend.

“We don’t care about Bud Light,” he says. “Target reacting to hatred and bigotry by cowering and by hiding us, that’s what we expect from corporations. So, we’re not surprised by it.”

What’s more important, he says, are the book bans making it near impossible for young people to access LGBTQ+ stories and legislation like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” and “Stop WOKE” laws which have made it illegal to discuss LGBTQ+ issues in the classroom and eviscerated the teaching of Black history. “That’s the stuff that’s important. Because that is some 1920s, 1930s Germany kind of stuff that’s going on in this country. Stealing healthcare from trans kids; that stuff is important. That stuff is making people commit suicide.”

The state of LGBTQ+ rights in the U.S. feels precarious, to say the least. Isn’t it reasonable, then, for even those of us who feel especially galvanized by the political climate to want to celebrate the community at Pride? Isn’t partying despite all the hatred itself a form of resistance?

For Walker and the Reclaim Pride Coalition, the two have never been mutually exclusive.

“Part of the mission statement for Rise and Resist, for instance—which was formed right after the 2016 election—is that the work that we’re going to do is going to be done with all of the joy we can muster,” he explains. “So, there’s a lot of fun at the Queer Liberation March even though everybody is focused on the politics of the moment and focused on standing up for our rights. There’s a ton of joy. There’s joy derived from being out in the streets as a community.”