I've attended more than 100 Pride events around the world and these are the most unique celebrations

In the moment, my first Pride seemed like a colossal mistake, but it turned out to be destiny.

When I was eight, my parents and I took our first and last family trip from Michigan to New York City, where one big-city calamity after another seemed to befall us. Near the end of the journey, I remember my mother gently weeping in the back of a taxi as we retrieved our illegally parked and duly towed car.

Before we fled Manhattan with what was left of our dignity, my father was determined to head downtown to check out the progress on the nearly completed Twin Towers World Trade Center. As fate would have it, NYC still had one surprise in store for us: a protest march that had grounded traffic on the west side to a complete halt. We got out of our car to watch the ragtag procession from the sidewalk, and I was instantly captivated.

“What are they doing, Dad?” I asked.

“Oh, they’re just a bunch of clowns,” came the reply.

A true clown fan at that stage of my life, I watched closely as the demonstrators streamed past us, but sadly, there was nary a red nose nor a big floppy shoe in sight. Many marchers may have had long hair and bright outfits and worn makeup in ways I’d never seen back in the Midwest, but these weren’t the clowns I was used to. I could tell they were happy, but I sensed their anger. Somehow, I realised that I was as connected to these folks as I was to my parents.

My vivid memories of this demonstration stayed with me, haunting me in the best possible way. Years later, I realised that I’d witnessed the 1972 edition of the Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day march, the precursor to the world’s modern Pride events, marking the third anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. In its coverage of that day’s march, the New York Times called it “an annual and increasingly assertive demonstration for acceptance by ‘straight society,’” noting that “several fathers, apparently thinking a parade was coming, hoisted their children onto their shoulders, only to go ashen-faced as the marchers passed.” Dad and I had been seen.

By the time I attended my next Pride more than a decade later, in the early ‘90s, I was a newly openly gay young man living on the opposite side of the US in Los Angeles. While some early advances in LGBTQ+ rights had by then been gained, HIV and AIDS were now ravaging our community, so I now understood all too well that bittersweet combination of joy and rage that I’d witnessed on the faces of those NYC marchers in 1972.

When I started travelling the world in earnest around the turn of the millennium, I became far more aware of the broad diversity of Pride events around the world. By then, a few cities like San Francisco and London had already held Pride events for more than a quarter century, but many more localities, big and small, around the world, were just getting started.

In 1998, the lure of EuroPride drew me to Stockholm for the first time, where I not only fell in long-term love with the Swedish capital but also with the Finnish guy who would become my partner for the next several years and a good friend for decades more. A week later, I experienced my first Amsterdam Pride, where the entire city lined the canals to watch the parade float by.

But Pride events can often include stark reminders of their vital importance to LGBTQ+ communities. In 2011 I marched in the very first Prague Pride, where the sheer exuberance among the city’s Queer populace was wonderfully palpable – but I also witnessed the visceral wrath of a sizable group of neo-Nazis, who made it clear that had they not been cordoned off by police, they would have eagerly bloodied those of us who proudly marched through the Czech capital that day.

A few months later, I attended one of the first Delhi Pride events in India, a truly surreal experience filled with joy, music and vivid colour – but plenty of secrecy, too, with half of the participants wearing masks to avoid persecution for their sexualities or gender identities. Being among them for this special day of at least semi-visibility felt like a true honour.

In 2016, the Los Angeles Pride parade happened just hours after the Pulse massacre in Orlando, Florida – not to mention that local police arrested a man on his way to the LA event with a carload of weapons. The mood among marchers on that day was just as defiant and determined as it had been in NYC in 1972.

Today, Pride means many different things to many different Queer people. For some, it’s still a protest march against injustice and bigotry. For others, increasingly, it’s the chance to see big-name performers (like Kylie Minogue at the most recent WeHo Pride in West Hollywood) with a completely Queer and allied audience. For still others, it’s simply a green light to party heartily. For many, it’s a rare chance to be oneself among others doing the same openly.

I’ve now been to upwards of a hundred Prides in my life, from Sydney to São Paulo and from Toronto to Tel Aviv to Taiwan, and it always feels like an incredible gift to share the joy of Pride with local Queers. At each of those Prides, there was at least one unexpected moment where I shared a special smile with the stranger next to me, a smile that transcended language barriers to say that we proudly own who we are together.

This year, as I close out June with new-to-me Pride events in Cardiff and Dublin, like any Queer person alive today, I can’t help but be mindful that our hard-fought rights are under constant assault and, in some places, have even slipped backwards. So, I will proudly join my bunch of clowns, and I’ll keep joining them however and wherever in the world I can.

The most unique Pride events around the world

Sydney Mardi Gras

Spanning mid-February to early March with more than a hundred community events, Sydney’s massive Mardi Gras is the largest Pride event in Oceania, drawing hundreds of thousands of attendees from across Australia and the world. In 2023, Mardi Gras was part of Sydney WorldPride, where one of my fondest memories was marching over Sydney Harbour Bridge with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Pride Amsterdam

No city makes better use of its assets for Pride than Amsterdam, where the early August climax of some 300 events is a lively procession of themed boats through the city’s gorgeous canals while what feels like the entire city looks on. The chance to be on the water in a little media dinghy among these big showboats was electrifying.

Taiwan LGBT+ Pride

Taiwan’s capital of Taipei annually plays host to Asia’s largest Pride event, attended by more than 175,000 people in 2023 – including the country’s then Vice President and now President Lai Ching-te – making it the biggest Pride event to date in Asia. For me, there was something really special about joining this joyous march in 2017, right after the country’s Judicial Yuan had ruled that the country’s existing marriage law, which denied same-sex couples the right to marry, was unconstitutional.

New York City Pride

The granddaddy of all Pride events, these days, NYC Pride culminates with a march through the city and PrideFest on the last Sunday of June to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. As an adult, one of my favourite NYC Pride moments was watching the newly elected New York Senator Hillary Clinton participate in the 2002 parade.

Madrid Orgullo

Known locally as MADO, Madrid Orgullo (or Pride) in early July is Europe’s largest Pride and always includes a human rights conference, the Muestra T cultural festival, and the MADO Awards recognising the vital work of LGBTQ+ and allied personalities and organisations. I’ll never forget the rush of riding atop a double-decker bus through a crowd of 3.5 million at Europe’s largest-ever Pride event to date, 2017’s WorldPride Madrid.