A global history of Pride
Hi, this is Erle from the visualisation team! In honour of Christopher Street Day, which took place in Berlin at the end of July, I am taking you on a journey through the sprawling history of pride celebrations all around the world.
About two weeks ago, on July 25, the annual Berlin Christopher Street Day celebration — also known as the Berlin Pride — was in full swing when a man drove a van into a crowd of festivalgoers, killing one person and injuring 29 others.
In light of this attack, I want to celebrate the long-standing global tradition of Pride. Over the last 56 years, some form of this event has taken place in about 96 countries. In many cases, it evolved from a small, grassroots protest into a large and joyful celebration where everyone is welcome. And in each and every place it has been held, it stands out as a testament to the resilience of the queer community in the face of violence, discrimination — historically, usually by law1 — and pressure to hide their true identity.
📝 A note on the dataset
Since I couldn’t find a comprehensive dataset for these timelines, I created one myself. I took this timeline of first pride marches as a starting point and had a Claude AI agent look at the Wikipedia articles related to Pride and the history of the LGBTQ+ community in each country in that list. From there, I had the agent investigate the sources that those articles were based on. I then manually verified the resulting data by checking sources, gathering additional ones if necessary, and correcting the dataset where needed.
In quite a few cases, it was difficult to even determine when the first pride event took place, because many of the gatherings credited by sources as “the first Pride” were small and grassroots-organized. They often took place at a moment in a country’s history in which being in a same-sex relationship was still a criminal offence, and being openly queer was dangerous. Since the aim of the chart is to celebrate even the smallest organised Pride as an act of resistance, I ended up adding those events to the dataset as well.
The full dataset can be found here, and a list of sources per country can be found here. I warmly invite you to take a look at the sources. There are some fascinating stories in there, such as this one about the Istanbul Pride or this one about the Pride in East Timor, and it’s easy to get lost in them for hours! Since pride history was documented better for some countries than for others, the final dataset likely still contains flaws and inconsistencies. I would therefore be grateful to anyone who spots an error in the data to contact me, so that I can correct it.
The tradition of Pride as we know it started with the so-called Stonewall riots. On 28 June 1969, the Stonewall Inn — a popular gay bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, New York — was raided by the police, remembered vividly by eyewitnesses decades later. Police raids on establishments frequented by queer people and other minorities were very common at the time, and this wasn’t the first time that there was pushback from the bar clientele. But due to the unusual circumstances of this raid — the bar’s patrons hadn’t been alerted by the police in advance, and a large crowd was present on the night that it happened — it incited a series of protests that went on for several nights.
The protests gave the queer community in Greenwich Village a sense of empowerment, and quickly evolved into larger activist movements, such as the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance.
Craig Rodwell, a longtime gay rights activist, used this momentum to plan the Christopher Street Liberation Day for the next year, on the date of the raid and the first protest. On June 28, 1970, marches on Christopher Street, as well as in Los Angeles and Chicago, became the first Gay Prides.
Show your colours with pride
In the above chart, the continents are mapped to the six colours of the pride flag. 🏳️🌈
The pride flag was created in 1978 by Gilbert Baker to support his friend Harvey Milk in his fight for gay rights. The original flag had eight colours, each of which symbolised an idea or concept important to the queer community.
Hover over the stripes to learn the meaning of the colours.
After Harvey Milk was assassinated in that same year, the flag was in high demand, and its production increased, which led to two notable changes: when the fabric in the hot pink colour became scarce, Baker decided to drop the pink stripe, and when organisers of the San Francisco Pride Parade in 1979 wanted to decorate the street lamps with the flags, the number of colours had to be even to be fully visible on the lamp poles, so Baker decided to merge the violet and turquoise stripes into a single blue colour. The end result was the six-colour flag as we know it today.
See this article for an extensive (and colourful) list of all flags used throughout the queer community. There are many — I have to admit, I didn’t know all of them!
Historically, Pride has been an occasion for people all around the world to freely express their identity — even if their government, or the prevalent cultural norms that they grew up with, or even their own family and acquaintances, don’t allow space for that identity. An attack on an event like this is an attack on everyone's right to live in peace as the person they are. We need to keep on protecting and celebrating that right, whatever time or place we live in. 🏳️🌈
Researching this week’s chart taught me a lot that I didn’t know yet about pride history, and it makes me feel even prouder to be a part of the queer community. I hope you learned a lot as well! Next week my colleague and fellow bi Toni will be back with another Weekly Chart.
