So far, 2025 has been a difficult year for Pride event organisers across different countries. On 18th March 2025, the Hungarian parliament passed a law effectively banning Pride events across the country, while also authorising the use of facial recognition technology to identify organisers and participants. Simultaneously, since President Trump’s frontal attack on Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) policies in the US, several corporate sponsors have reduced or cancelled their contributions to Pride events nationwide. The withdrawal of sponsors from Pride events has also reached several countries across Europe. In the UK, four of the largest Pride events have formally banned politicians from attending in their official capacity, after the Supreme Court’s decision on the definition of the concept of ‘woman’ – a ruling that directly threatens the rights of trans people – has been welcome by Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer. These examples show the critical role that Pride events play in advancing LGBTQIA+ people’s rights, as well as the dangers that come from conservative and far-right forces that seek to shun and limit the rights of these marginalised groups.
Political suppression and corporate withdrawal threaten LGBTQIA+ visibility
In my book The Politics of Pride Events: Global and Local Challenges, I discuss the importance of Pride events as the key site to showcase the political potential and power of LGBTQIA+ communities in demanding rights, dignity and respect.
The book also shows that Pride events are – crucially – a space for queer joy and celebration, and an outlet for liberation from the restrictive norms of a world that often stifles, questions or openly persecutes sexual and gender expression. In the book, I introduce the concept of ‘Kaleidoscope Modernities’ to signal the open-ended, plural and sometimes conflictual nature of Pride events worldwide, challenging the notion that Global North Pride forms are the only desirable path to liberation.
Pride as resistance and celebration: Reclaiming its radical roots
As the most visible form of LGBTQIA+ visibility and mobilisation, Pride events have grown exponentially across the Global North and the Global South, with parades, marches, sit-ins, protests and other gatherings now being organised in major urban centres and in small towns and villages. Established Pride events in big cities, such as New York City, London and São Paulo now attract millions of LGBTQIA+ people and allies. In peripheral and rural locations, small Pride events can go a long way in changing people’s attitudes and perspectives.
Decolonising Pride: Rethinking western-centric models
This worldwide success and growth is both impressive and challenging: On the one hand, rising financial costs often cast a long shadow over the organisers’ ability to put together both mega-events as well as small gatherings; on the other hand, the growth of Pride events can sometimes lead to a watering down of the political messaging necessary to advance rights claims, as celebratory and corporate elements, via the presence of sponsors, become more prevalent than more politically engaged narratives.
Generic slogans such as ‘love is love’ or ‘be proud’ sometimes end up overshadowing more complex narratives on social justice issues that these events could helpfully spotlight. Simultaneously, Pride events are sometimes instrumentalised by political actors as markers of a nation’s purported entry into Western modernity. These pressures can lead to conflicts between perceived external proponents of LGBTQIA+ rights and domestic actors defending alleged ‘national values’.
In some cases, Pride events and LGBTQIA+ rights are co-opted as ‘pinkwashing’ such as in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, where LGBTQIA+ rights are used as an excuse to ‘liberate’ people who have been deprived of basic human rights, such as the right to life, under the Israeli occupation. The case of two Israeli soldiers waving a rainbow flag on Beit Lahia’s beach, proclaiming that ‘they had brought Pride to Gaza’ is a chilling exemplification of this cynical political appropriation of the movement.
The future of Pride: Reclaiming space in a restrictive world
The future of Pride events unfolds within a global climate where the rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association were already weakened by the restrictions imposed during 2020–2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rise of populist and far-right forces around the world has further constricted the public space available to marginalised voices. Against this backdrop, we must ask whether LGBTQIA+ liberation can break free from corporate budgets, token gestures and rainbow-branded merchandise and reclaim its grassroots mission to unite across intersections against homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism, colonialism and other structural oppressions worldwide.
Francesca Romana Ammaturo is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and International Relations at London Metropolitan University.
The Politics of Pride Events by Francesca Romana Ammaturo is available on Bristol University Press. Order here for £27.99.
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