Pride and prejudice

SPEAKING at Lithuania’s gay-pride parade last year, Birgitta Ohlsson was pelted with eggs. Even so, the mood was much better than at the inaugural event three years earlier, says Ms Ohlsson, who is Sweden’s Minister for European Union Affairs and a prominent advocate for gay rights. This time round cheering supporters outshouted the hundreds of protesters, and the number of marchers had doubled, to roughly 1,000.

Nearly 500 gay-pride events took place in 2012 and the total for 2013, when tallied, is sure to be greater, according to InterPride, a network of groups that run them. Nine out of ten were in Europe or North America. They included seminars, films and parties, with a gay-pride march as the centrepiece of most. The way the march looks—and whether one is allowed at all—is a barometer of gay rights in a country, says Evelyne Paradis of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), an umbrella group.

The first pride marches, in America four decades ago, were protests against police violence and harassment. Today’s vary from solemn rallies calling for acceptance and equality in homophobic places to huge street parties sponsored by city authorities keen on the tourist revenues. Last October the first parade in Podgorica, the capital of EU-hopeful Montenegro, had almost 2,000 police protecting 150 marchers from ten times as many protesters. Ukraine’s first, in May, also featured a heavy police presence. But last year was the third that Serbian authorities refused to allow a march, fearing a repeat of the violence that marred Belgrade’s first, in 2010. By contrast the main threat for revellers in the parade in Washington, DC—nearly 40 years old and one of the city’s attractions—is the summer heat, says Ryan Bos, the executive director of the organisation that runs it.

A flashy parade may indicate a government’s commitment to gay rights, but not necessarily wide acceptance. São Paulo’s, the world’s largest, attracts more than 3m participants and around $75m in tourist revenues annually. But in Brazil in 2012, according to Grupo Gay da Bahia, an advocacy organisation, 338 people were murdered in homophobic hate crimes.

Where governments are lukewarm, foreign diplomats like Ms Ohlsson often feature in the first event. That helps ensure police protection (though it also gives fodder to those locals who view homosexuality as a decadent Western import). Local participation usually grows quickly in subsequent years. Around 500 marched in Taiwan’s first parade in 2003, many wearing masks. Nine years later 65,000 joined an event as festive and shirtless as those in New York or San Francisco.

In many places gay-rights rallies are almost unthinkable. In 2012 only seven took place in the 87 countries InterPride categorises as “most hostile” for gay people, which includes most of the 78 in which gay sex is criminalised. But Uganda’s oppressed gays held their first in 2012, even as their parliament mulled imposing the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”, which covers “repeat offences”.

Yet public attitudes can change faster than the law. Celebrities and crowds protested in December when India’s supreme court declared a 19th-century law counting gay sex as a crime to be still in force. And planning for Mumbai’s sixth gay-pride march is in full swing.

Where parades are banned, creativity helps. In 2012 activists rode through Minsk, Belarus, in a tram festooned with gay-pride rainbow flags; Albanians took to their bikes for the Tirana Gay (P)Ride. Rallies are banned in China, so Shanghai’s event features a Pride Run instead. Rumours abound of gestures by athletes during Sochi’s approaching Winter Olympics, in protest against Russia’s ban on “gay propaganda”. Some see the German team’s multi-coloured outfits as a statement in support of gay rights. The country’s sports officials say they aimed only to be fashionable and cheerful. Their athletes may become a rallying symbol all the same.