Just married today, Giovani Miranda tosses a flower as his partner Todd Fernandez walks with him during the gay pride march in New York today. (AP)
Revelers march in the New York Gay Pride Parade, carrying signs that read, ‘Forever Proud.’ (Getty Images)
TEAM EFFORT: A couple dressed up as Batman and Robin share a smooch during the parade. (AFP/Getty Images)
Crowds cheer marchers during the parade, made even more festive by the recent Supreme Court decisions. (Getty Images)
STRIKE A POSE: A caped man seems to be channeling his inner Superman during the parade. (Getty Images)
Governor Andrew Cuomo, who made bringing same-sex marriage to New York a priority, waves to the crowd. (Getty Images)
MARCH ON: Revelers wave gay pride flags as they walk the parade route. (Getty Images)
Only days after the Supreme Court used her lawsuit to grant same-sex couples federal marriage benefits, Edith Windsor helped lead New York City’s Gay Pride march on Sunday.
Signs along the route read, “Thank you, Edie” — celebrating Windsor for her successful challenge of a provision of the Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.
“If somebody had told me 15 years ago that I would be the marshal of New York City’s gay pride parade in 2013, at the age of 84, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg joined hundreds of bikers whose motorcycles roared to life at noon to kick off the celebration, a colorful cavalcade of activists and others who marched down Fifth Avenue 44 years after the city’s first pride march.
“We’re Dykes on Bikes,” announced Marcia Jackson, of Burbank, Calif., a member of the lesbian motorcycle club who clutched the waist of Tyrone White on their motorcycle. Jackson grinned as she explained White’s connection to the sisterhood — he’s undergoing a sex-change procedure.
Longtime LGBT activist Cathy Renna said Windsor’s suit and the Supreme Court’s favorable ruling in a challenge to Proposition 8, the California gay marriage ban, made this year’s celebration special.
“It is an especially thrilling year to march this year,” she said. “I have seen more real progress in the past three years than the nearly two decades of activism before it.”
But, she added, “we must remain vigilant; hate crimes, discrimination and family rejection loom in our lives still.”
A spate of recent hate crimes in New York provide a stark reminder of work left to be done. In one case last month, police said a gunman used homophobic slurs before firing a fatal shot into a man’s face on a Manhattan street alive with a weekend midnight crowd. The city’s police commissioner called it an anti-gay hate crime.
A. Carlos Cardinas, a native of Colombia who lives in Queens, is a transvestite who dressed up in festive attire for the day: a green sequined top with a salmon-colored flower ringing the waist.
“We are so happy to live free in America,” said Cardinas, a hairdresser who is engaged to be married to his boyfriend.
Carl Siciliano, who heads the Ali Forney drop-in center for homeless gay youth in Harlem, said he’s happy about the court decision. But he said the humanitarian fight is not over.
“Now that our adults have won this wonderful victory, it is time for us to begin to build a safety net for the more than 200,000 homeless LGBT youth who are stranded on America’s streets without shelter,” said Siciliano.
Windsor said she long enjoyed the parade with her late wife, Thea Spyer, whom she married in Canada as Spyer was dying in 2007.
In 2009, she suffered a heart attack a month after Spyer’s death. While recovering, Windsor faced a hefty bill for inheritance taxes — more than $363,000, because Spyer was, legally, just a friend.
On Sunday, Windsor was one of three grand marshals, joining musician and activist Harry Belafonte and Earl Fowlkes, head of the Center for Black Equity.
“I have marched in the parade for the last several years carrying a huge rainbow flag,” she said. “Last year, I was so elated that I danced my way down the whole street, for the entire route of the parade.”
Kennedy turned away the appeal with no additional comment as the 43rd annual pride parade was getting underway in San Francisco, where dozens of couples have gotten married since Friday and where the clerk’s office remained open to issue more licenses on Sunday.
Same-sex marriage opponents asked Kennedy to step in on Saturday, a day after the federal appeals court in San Francisco allowed same-sex marriages to go forward by lifting a hold it had imposed on such unions while a lawsuit challenging the state’s voter-approved ban on gay marriage made its way to and through the high court.
The Supreme Court cleared the way for the marriages to resume for the first time in 4 ½ years when it ruled Wednesday that Proposition 8’s backers lacked standing to defend the 2008 law once California’s governor and attorney general refused to do so.
The two couples who sued to overturn Proposition 8 are riding in a contingent organized by San Francisco’s city attorney. Newlyweds Kris Perry and Sandy Stier of Berkeley, and Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo of Burbank, got married on Friday within hours of the appeals court’s action.
Attorney General Kamala Harris, whose decision not to defend the ban helped secure its defeat, also is participating as a grand marshal. Parade organizers planned to hold a VIP reception for couples who have married in San Francisco over the weekend.
San Francisco was not the only city hosting what were expected to be especially well-attended and exuberant gay pride parades following the court’s decision in the California case and a second ruling granting gay couples the federal benefits of marriage they were previously denied. Large crowds also gathered in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Seattle and St. Louis.
The parade in New York City, where the first pride march was held 44 years ago to mark the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots that kicked off the modern gay rights movement, also was a sort of victory lap for Edith Windsor, the 84-year-old widow who challenged the federal Defense of Marriage Act after she was forced to pay $363,053 on the estate of her late wife.
Windsor was picked as a grand marshal of New York’s parade months ago and planned to walk up Fifth Avenue during the event.
In Chicago, 25-year-old Catherine Gallagher was part of a massive crowd celebrating the court rulings. It was her first time at the pride parade, and she said high court’s decision that says gay married couples should have the same rights as gay ones makes the parade even better.