Queer New Yorkers hailing from the World’s Borough and across the city kicked off Pride month on June 7 at the 34th annual Queens Pride Parade in Jackson Heights, celebrating their “unstoppable pride” as they marched, performed, and spent time with their loved ones.
“I always try to come out and never miss it, because this is the only opportunity that we have to create a united front as trans women,” Pamela Torre Alba, 36, who has lived in Queens for four years and is originally from Venezuela, told Gay City News in Spanish.
For Torre, Pride means “an opportunity to exist, it means resilience, and it means everything that has meaning as a human being,” she said after marching along with her chosen family along with a coalition of organizations including Make The Road, the Colectivo Intercultural TRANSgrediendo, and the Translatina Network. “The ‘T’ cannot be untied from LGBTQ.”
The annual celebration is traditionally the first major Pride parade of the season in New York City. Former City Councilmember and public school teacher Daniel Dromm and activist Maritza Martinez founded Queens Pride following the brutal murder of Julio Rivera, a gay man, in 1990, who the route commemorates, and sparked by pushback at the time against the pro-LGBTQ Children of the Rainbow school curriculum. The event was renamed the New Queens Pride in 2022 after the LGBT Network claimed leadership.
Even before the noon kickoff, crowds began gathering along 37th Avenue. Marching bands were warming up, cheerleaders from Cheer New York practiced their moves, and queer people of all ages, from youth to older adults from the Queens Center for Gay Seniors, prepared for the spectacle.
Chloe Elentari was ready to lead.
“Everyone deserves a life where they can be happy, where they can be celebrated by the people around them,” said Elentari, a drum major and one of 209 people marching in the Queer Big Apple Corps.
“I am 45 years old, Chloe is only about three years old, so before that I was living as a cis-het man on Long Island,” she said, explaining that she attended her first pride in 2024. “It’s a wonderful journey coming out as myself, being able to discover who I am, realizing what gender is, understanding my own body.”
The contingent of lesbian motorcyclists Dykes on Bikes headed off the procession.
Prominent elected officials, including NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York State Attorney General Letitia James, flanked by crowds of supporters, were not far behind.
As is tradition, the parade paused for a moment of silence — and speeches — at the intersection of 37th Avenue and 78th Street, where Rivera was murdered.
“We’re going to make sure that every single LGBTQ Queens and New York City resident… [is] safe and feel like they belong in every single community,” Dromm told the crowd. “Pride is an important part of that, and we are unstoppable as a community.”
“If anyone ever tries to threaten a New Yorker or the laws that protect New Yorkers, know that every single one of us will be there to fight back,” Mayor Mamdani said. “Because Pride is something that we don’t just have in June, it’s something that we have every month of the year.”
Not everyone at the parade was celebrating. Before the festivities began, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, flanked by LGBTQ officers, held a brief press conference alongside the Gay Officers Action League to protest the decision of Heritage of Pride, the organizers of the city’s main Pride March, to exclude police officers from carrying firearms while marching.
“That decision is as hurtful as it is a slap in the face,” said Tisch, deriding what she called the march’s “offensive and exclusionary stance on this issue,” as cops plan, for the sixth year, to skip the march.
As Tisch and the weapons-bearing officers marched, a group of protesters, holding signs stood by the side reading “No Pride in Genocide,” “Zionism = Terrorism,” and “Silence = Death.”
“I love Queens Pride; it’s one of the most diverse, oldest prides, very inspiring space, very community-oriented,” Ray, 32, one of the protestors, told Gay City News. “And as a person who supports Palestine, it’s very important for me to be here, because there are queer people in Gaza who are being bombed who don’t get to benefit from this, and people often don’t think about this.”
Many onlookers of the march celebrated it as a representation of the borough’s diversity.
“I like that it’s so local, it’s not as corporate as the major one in Manhattan,” said Leo, 32, who lives in Queens and has been coming for the past 6 years. “I think it’s celebrating diversity in general, in the diversest place in the city.”
Leo was holding a rainbow-making face paint stamp that he shared with strangers in an attempt to “gayify all of Queens,” he explained. “We’re working on it.”
“It’s immediately apparent that it’s a lot more communal than Manhattan Pride,” said Maxine, who stood along the route with her girlfriend Molly.
The couple, who are both 27, have been together for the past four and a half years. This is their first time celebrating pride in Queens. Molly wore the shirt she painted a rainbow onto to mark the occasion.
