Pride Houston announced this year’s Pride Houston celebration will take the form of a rally and march at City Hall as a show of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
“We are vigilantly aware that our own ability to celebrate our Pride and our progress as LGBTQIA+ people cannot be taken for granted when protesters of similar and related movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, take to the streets. It is with a determined mind that we at Pride Houston, Inc. have decided that this year’s Pride Celebration will be a rally and march at Houston City Hall on June 27, 2020. We stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and to recognize that Pride is not colorblind to the brutality of the world we are living in today,” Pride Houston said in a release announcing the march and rally.
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The organization’s announcement came Thursday, as the country saw it’s third week of nationwide protests against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s death on May 25.
“The George Floyd murder met us at a time where we as a community fully understand that all black lives matter. Thus, the Black Lives Matter movement is also an LGBTQ movement. Our legacy of Stonewall reminds us that great change comes at a cost,” Pride Houston Chair Emeritus Harrison Guy said in a release.
The Houston march and rally will take place from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. June 27. Pride Houston welcomes all “Houstonians and city officials” to attend.
The march and rally on June 27 will replace the organization’s annual parade and festival, which had previously been delayed to the fall due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Now it is time to take a stand and fight AGAIN against the homophobia, against theracism and against the cruel and illegal structures of power that discriminate against queer people and against people of color,” Houston Pride President and CEO Lo Roberts said.
The event will coincide with Global Pride 2020 and will also take place during Pride Month, which is celebrated each June to commemorate the Stonewall riots that began on June 28, 1969 when police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar that catered to members of the gay community in New York City. The raid touched off riots that were considered the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.
Pride Houston also announced it revamped it’s logo to include black and brown stripes, which represent people of color. Blue, pink and white stripes represent transgender, nonbinary and gender nonconforming people.
For more information about the march and rally, visit pridehouston.org.