The canal parade has been a key part of Pride since the first one in 1996. 2016 also saw Amsterdam host Euro-Pride, a pan-European event dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights and culture.Īmsterdam Pride is the only capital city in the world that features a pride parade on water! Instead of the usual march with floats and groups of people walking through the streets of a city, Amsterdam’s parade travels a route through the city’s famous historic centre along its canals. In 2016, for the 20th anniversary of the first Pride Amsterdam, the event was bigger than ever, spanning across the first two weeks of August. Pride Amsterdam also recently introduced a Pride Walk to demonstrate against anti-gay violence both locally and internationally. While Pride Amsterdam may not serve the same purpose of commemorating the Stonewell riots as other Pride events do, the sheer scale of the celebrations (and the fact that the event is always hosted in the Dutch capital) has resulted in Pride Amsterdam becoming the main Dutch Gay Pride.ĭuring Pride week in the first week of August, parties pop up all across the city, with the Reguliersdwarsstraat right at the centre of it all. So since 1996, there have been two pride events in the Netherlands every year. Pride Amsterdam differed from Pink Saturday and most other Pride events around the world, as its focus was purely to celebrate freedom and diversity in Amsterdam, and didn’t serve as a political demonstration for equal rights. The first edition of Pride Amsterdam as we know it was held on the first weekend of August in 1996. That’s when a group of people from the bar Havana on the Reguliersdwarsstraat came up with the idea for a new event: Pride Amsterdam!
Pride AmsterdamĪs time passed, members of the LGBTQ+ community felt that Amsterdam’s status as a trailblazing gay city was starting so slip, so they wanted to do something about it. This year, the event is set to be held in Leeuwarden. Held on the last Saturday of the month of June, Pink Saturday travels around the country and is hosted by a different Dutch city every year. After two years, the event was rebranded as Pink Saturday. The organisation changed its pride policy in the late 1970s though, and hosted their first Gay Liberation and Solidarity Day, or Gay Pride Day, in Amsterdam on June 25, 1977.
The COC saw gay people as normal beings, and so didn’t see the need for demonstrations. There were gay rights demonstrations in 19 in the Netherlands, but at the time, the Dutch gay rights organisation COC didn’t want to organise an official Gay Pride like may cities in the US had. Here, the Stonewall riots are commemorated by what is known as Pink Saturday. However, in the Netherlands, it is a little different. These marches paved the way for parades fighting for gay liberation and freedom across the US, and the rest of the world. On the one year anniversary in 1970, and every year since then, the Stonewall riots have been commemorated in New York and several other cities with Pride marches. On June 28, 1969, members of the LGBTQ+ community rioted in response to a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York. Pride parades in most cities are used to mark the Stonewall riots of the 1960s. Pride Amsterdam is one of the highlights of the yearly event calendar, but where did it all begin? As the event is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2021, let’s take a walk through history, and see how the pride celebrations we know and love today started. Normally marked by a week’s worth of music, dancing, talks, and (of course) the remarkable canal parade, Pride paints Amsterdam rainbow, with everyone going out to celebrate the power of love, and work to make the changes that still need to happen here in the Netherlands and internationally. While Amsterdam Pride might look and feel a little different this year, the implications of coronavirus do not in any way diminish the impact and importance of Pride in the Dutch capital.