49th Boston Pride Parade commemorates Stonewall riots

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This Gay thread comes courtesy of Dead eye, one of the two most hateful racist homophobic assholes on GFY who bragged about "many more Gay bashing posts to come"

Dead eye wishes we lived back in the day when beating Gay people was legal, so fuckwits like him could beat people to raise their low self esteem, but fortunately a lot of that changed after the Gay Stonewall riots.

49th Boston Pride Parade commemorates Stonewall riots

Fifty-two years ago, Dale Mitchell told his mother he was gay. She vomited.

Mitchell said he was “beaten up a couple of times” when he was younger — also because he was gay.

But there was a turning point: the Stonewall riots of June 1969, in which a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City, spurred days of violent clashes in an uprising considered to be a pivotal moment in the gay rights movement.

"Fifty years ago we were throwing rocks at the police,” said Mitchell. On Saturday, police escorted the 49th Boston Pride Parade through the city’s streets and Mitchell — now 70, married to the man he’s been with for 40 years and founder of the LGBT Aging Project — was the grand marshal of it all.

“It is a mind-blowing experience to think that we have come this far in 50 short years,” Mitchell said. “Thank you to everyone for struggling for justice.”

A rainbow of acceptance and pride washed over the city Saturday as a record-breaking 431 groups participated and an organizer-estimated 750,000 spectators attended the event. Brightly clad marchers and revelers danced throughout the 2.27-mile parade route under sunny skies punctuated by confetti showers.

Fellow Stonewall veterans Paul Glass, 69, and his husband, Charles Evans, 70, perched with Mitchell atop the backseat of a convertible as they rolled through the streets.

“It was scary but it was liberating at the same time,” Glass said of the riots. “As a result of that, I went back to Boston and a couple weeks later I finally came out to my family. I felt liberated enough that I could do that.”

Just as Stonewall gave him hope five decades ago, Glass, who lives with his husband in Falmouth, wants its commemoration to give the younger LGBT generation “the strength they need to kind of push forward and cross those milestones that are ahead of them."

Taking stock of advancements in LGBT rights — while remaining cognizant of work still to be done — was central to this year’s parade theme, “Looking Back, Loving Forward.”

Boston Pride Committee President Linda DeMarco said, “Here in Massachusetts, in Boston, we’re very, very fortunate to be living on an island of itself with all the rights this state affords the LGBT community. But it’s not the same across the United States and across the world. So we need to do pride marches like this to continue to fight for equality.”

Mitchell said members of the LGBT community have to be “very, very vigilant in protecting our rights” — particularly under the Trump administration, which has effectively banned those who are transgender from serving in the military and reversed their health care discrimination protections.

Yet against that backdrop — and the uproar caused this week by a local conservative group’s plans for a “Straight Pride Parade” this summer — Boston Pride remained a largely upbeat affair, save for a couple of anti-Pride Christian demonstrators who walked the parade route.

Mayor Martin J. Walsh acknowledged “there’s talk of that other parade,” but said to “just ignore it.”

“Today’s a great day for Boston, that so many people come into our city today and get to experience this parade and get to experience a good feeling in the city of Boston,” Walsh said.

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