What’s now known as the annual Chicago Pride Parade started nearly 54 years ago with a modest rally for gay and lesbian rights in an area of Washington Square Park known as Bughouse Square.
About 150 people gathered there June 27, 1970, to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots, a days-long uprising among queer people in New York City after police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.
The Chicago activists carried Pride flags and shouted “Gay Power” and, after a series of speeches, marched to the Civic Center, now known as Richard J. Daley Plaza, said activist Gary Chichester, who was among those at the event.
The march happened hours before LGBTQ+ activists in San Francisco took to the streets and a day before queer people in New York City did the same, making Chicago’s Pride March the first in the country, Chichester said.
The following year, activists got a permit for their event and the march became a parade. Since then, the tradition has steadily grown, with the 2023 Pride Parade attracting nearly 1 million spectators.
But this year’s Chicago Pride Parade, happening June 30 at 11 a.m., will be somewhat smaller, after Chicago officials introduced a series of changes in hopes of lessening its strain on city resources. The parade’s downsizing has been met with intense backlash from some LGBTQ+ groups, who said they were made without meaningful community engagement and during a time when attacks against the LGBTQ+ community are on the rise.
“I’ve been involved with these parades since the beginning and year after year, I’ve always felt like we moved forward,” Chichester said. “Until this year, when we’re really moving backwards with no input.”
Parade organizers told Windy City Times in April they weren’t informed of the city’s new parade limits until mid-March, leaving them “frustrated” and with three months to adjust plans. But they’ve since reached a compromise with the city that lessened the cuts to the parade entries. The organizers recently said in a statement to Windy City Times they were “adapting to meet the needs of our city while preserving the legacy of our parade.”
Changes to this year’s parade
The Chicago Pride Parade draws hundreds of thousands of people to the North Side every year and is one of the largest LGBTQ+ celebrations in the country. But it’s also known for lasting hours, with the 2023 parade taking four-and-a-half hours to wrap, partially due to brief rain delay.
City officials have said the changes to this year’s Pride Parade are aimed at shortening its runtime and better managing city resources during a busy summer in Chicago that includes large-scale events like the Democratic National Convention, happening Aug. 19-22 at the United Center. Additionally, this year’s Pride Parade happens the same day that the Rolling Stones will perform at Soldier Field, the same week as Fourth of July and the weekend before NASCAR’s Chicago Street Race.
“What we’re up against right now is really just staffing challenges,” said Jackie Rosa, deputy mayor for community engagement. “Often what ends up happening is we’re seeing staff—not just police, but also Streets and Sanitation and the Office of Emergency Management Control—working straight for 18-19 hours.”
The main changes aimed at reducing this strain include capping its number of entries at 150 groups, which is 25% smaller than the 199 groups that marched in last year’s parade; starting the parade at the intersection of Broadway and Sheridan Road in Lake View, which is a few blocks south of its former starting point at Broadway and Montrose Avenue in Uptown; and shifting the start time to an hour earlier to 11 a.m.
These changes also come down to public safety, said Ald. Bennett Lawson (44th Ward), whose ward encompasses most of the parade route.
Removing a few blocks from the start of the parade will free up more officers to staff other parts of the city or shifts throughout the day, Lawson said. Additionally, the earlier start time and reduced number of entries will help ensure the event better aligns with the Chicago Police Department’s shift changes, allowing for an easier transition after the parade and again in the late-night hours, Lawson said.
“It’s about the safety of the entire day,” Lawson said. “So if we have to make tweaks on the front end to keep things safer on the back end, I think everyone is willing to do that.”
Chicago is also imposing these limits to ensure the Pride Parade better complies with a city ordinance restricting parades to 2 hours and 15 minutes, Rosa said.
“That is the time that’s supposed to be met,” Rosa said. “Unfortunately for a variety of reasons, that time hasn’t always been kept consistently, and so what’s happened is that all previous administrations have let parades go over.”
The ordinance does have a grandfather clause for a “traditional parade [that] consistently has lasted longer” to be provided additional hours, which the city has agreed to do by allowing the Pride Parade from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., said Ronnie Reese, a spokesperson for Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office.
The Chicago Pride Parade is not the only summer event facing these kinds of restrictions, Rosa said. Other large-scale events, like the Bud Billiken Parade set for Aug. 10, are also being scaled back.
Antwan Anderson, director of programming and sponsor engagement for the Bud Billiken Parade, told Windy City Times the organizers of that tradition are facing similar pressure and working with the city to adapt.
“It really comes down to the huge burden on the city’s resources,” Anderson said. “They already don’t have enough people to fill certain positions within the CTA, OEMC and things like that. So we’re following suit—the same as Pride—by trying to work with the city to make sure we’re not a burden on its resources but can still work as a community to put the parade together.”
Engaging with the LGBTQ+ community
The current plan for this year’s Pride Parade stems from a compromise made between parade organizers and the city with input from various LGBTQ+ groups, who were only brought into the planning process after Windy City Times broke the news of this year’s cuts. And concerns about community engagement from the city persist.
City officials originally proposed a 125-entry cap on the parade, but eventually raised it to 150 after weeks of pressure and an open letter to the mayor from LGBTQ+ activists, elected officials and other leaders.
A joint statement between the city and the parade’s organizers touted the compromise as a “collaborative” effort with the LGBTQ+ community. But groups have criticized the city’s lack of transparency regarding these decisions.
Jun-Soo Huh, who chairs the mayor’s LGBTQ+ Advisory Council, told Windy City Times the group was not consulted about downsizing the parade before the changes were introduced. The city did not engage City Council’s LGBT Caucus either, said Maria Hadden (49th Ward), who is one of nine openly LGBTQ+ alderpeople in Chicago.
“They did in the end engage a broader set of the community, and we appreciate that,” said Brian Johnson, CEO of Equality Illinois, which had signed onto the open letter. “What we’d like to see … on the front end is more engagement of groups like the mayor’s LGBTQ+ advisory council and queer groups across the city so everybody can be responsive to ideas before the city is just unilaterally making decisions about us.”
The issue has raised larger concerns about LGBTQ+ community engagement under Mayor Johnson.
Robert Castillo, who sits on the LGBTQ+ Advisory Council, said the Pride Parade situation underscores why Johnson’s administration needs to hire an LGBTQ+ director to act as a liaison between the mayor’s office and the community.
Rosa said she recently started working to secure grant money to fund a chief LGBTQ+ officer within the mayor’s office for three years, similar to the chief homelessness officer that was named in April. Rosa hopes the position can be created by the fall, she said.
Castillo has avidly protested the cuts to this year’s Pride Parade by speaking on the issue at events like the April 26 opening of the LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project exhibit, where he wore a DIY shirt that said “Leave Pride Alone!” Castillo has also hand-painted dozens of buttons with the message, which he passes out at community gatherings.
“The theme of this year’s parade is ‘Pride is Power,’ and it’s problematic that city agencies are going to do everything they’ve done to our power,” Castillo said.
Anna DeShawn, founder and CEO of E3 Radio, recently spoke on the issue while accepting the Community Pride Award June 2 at Equality Illinois’ annual Pride Brunch.
DeShawn called out Chicago’s leadership for shortening the Pride Parade and criticized the city’s new safety plan for failing to mention LGBTQ+ people. Johnson also spoke at the event, where he thanked the LGBTQ+ Advisory Council—which DeShawn sits on—for “guiding our work.”
Mayor Johnson campaigned heavily within Chicago’s LGBTQ+ community and on a robust platform promising to invest in the city as a “regional hub for LGBTQ community and culture.”
Since becoming mayor, Johnson has continued showing up at community events like the Queer Fam Pride Jam, Center on Halsted happenings and more. Johnson also kicked off Pride Month June 3 at a Progress Pride Flag-raising ceremony in Daley Plaza, where he said the flag was symbolic of the city’s commitment to making Chicago a safe and welcoming place for all LGBTQ+ people.
“This administration is obviously one that really ran on a coalition, and that included the LGBTQ+ community,” Rosa said. “Unfortunately, this parade situation is one that a lot of people feel a little demoralized by, but moving forward we’ll be making a concerted effort of bringing people into the fold early on and being very transparent.”
How Pride Parade organizers have adapted
Parade organizers said in a statement they were responding to the changes “optimistically” while focusing on how to optimize this year’s celebration in a way that maximizes LGBTQ+ participation.
The organizers have adapted by giving priority to LGBTQ+ groups and organizations, LGBTQ+-owned businesses and businesses with employee resource groups, they said. Participation among politicians is also being consolidated into fewer entries.
Some highlights of this year’s celebration include celebrity grand marshals Fortune Feimster and her wife, Jax Smith, who met at Chicago Pride in 2015. Community marshals include Chicago activist and bar owner Art Johnston and his partner in life and business, Jose “Pepe” Peña, as well as Myles and Precious Brady-Davis, longtime LGBTQ+ activists and a high-profile transgender couple.
“These couples epitomize this year’s theme of ‘Pride is Power,’ not just through their own achievements, but through their unwavering support and commitment to advancing LGBTQ+ rights and visibility,” said Tim Frye, lead coordinator.
Frye has also donated a trolley for the Prime Timers group and Illinois Commission on LGBTQ+ Aging in honor of his late husband, Richard Pfeiffer, who died in October 2019. Frye and Pfeiffer founded PRIDEChicago, the group that now organizes the parade, in 1974.
At 81 years old, Frye feels a personal connection with these organizations, he said.
This year’s parade will also feature several first-time entries, including LGBTQ+-owned businesses like Edgewater Candles, Vincent Restaurant and Chicago LSD Radio, organizers said.
“We want to reaffirm that the Chicago Pride Parade is not just an event—it has been a beacon of hope, resilience and strength for half a century,” the organizers said in a statement.