Celebrations planned amid a darker national environment

NEW YORK » LGBTQ Pride commemorations that sometimes felt like victory parties for civil-rights advances are grappling this year with a darker atmosphere, a national environment of ramped-up legislative and rhetorical battles over sexual orientation and gender identity.

Big crowds are expected

Sunday at Pride events in New York City and a range of other places including San Francisco, Chicago, Denver and Toronto, in a return to large, in-person events after two years of pandemicinduced restrictions.

The celebrations are expected to be exuberant and festive. But for many, they will also will carry a renewed sense of urgency:

• In March, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law barring teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, which critics decried as an effort to marginalize LGBTQ people and lambasted as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

• In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, like DeSantis a Republican, sent a letter to state health agencies in February saying that it would be child abuse under state law for transgender youth to get gender-affirming medical care. A judge has halted full implementation of any parental prosecutions.

“There are so many antiLGBTQ attacks going on around the country and a lot of them are really about trying to erase our existence and to make us invisible, and to make our young people invisible and our elders invisible,” said Michael Adams, CEO of SAGE, which advocates for LGBTQ elders.

“This year’s Pride is especially important and it is more powerful than ever because it is about people stepping up and stepping out and saying, ‘We refuse to be invisible. We refuse to be erased.’”

Ellen Ensig-Brodsky, 89, has embraced both those roles in her decades of attending Pride as a LGBTQ rights activist.

“The parade is the display, publicly, of my identity and my group that I have been part of for at least 40 or more years,” she said, adding that she will march again Sunday. “I certainly would not want to miss it.”

After all this time, the animosity and hostility she is seeing around the country aren’t unfamiliar to her.

“The intent to increase anti-LGBTQ existence is a return to what I started out with” decades ago, she said. Back then, “we didn’t come out. We hid.”