An exhibition of artifacts, photographs and archive documents celebrating 20 years of Taiwan Pride, Asia’s largest LGBTQ Pride parade, opened at Songshan Cultural and Creative Park in Taipei yesterday.
The Taiwan Rainbow Civil Action Association, which has organized Taiwan Pride since 2012, said the Walk With Pride exhibition, which runs through Nov. 6, would also look at the challenges and controversies encountered by those running the parade over the past two decades.
The exhibition’s curators and designers said they hoped visitors would be able to learn about the major milestones in Taiwan Pride’s history and be able to place themselves in the shoes of past parade attendees to bear witness to the progress made toward equality in Taiwan.
As in years past, this year’s Taiwan Pride parade is to be held on the last Saturday of October, which falls on Oct. 29 this year.
After opting to hold a mix of online and in-person events last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizers said that this year’s event would return to its usual format with a full-scale parade.
On June 28 — International LGBT+ Pride Day and the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York — Taiwan Pride organizers announced that this year’s event would follow the theme “An Unlimited Future.”
The Stonewall riots were protests in response to a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, events that are considered a watershed event that transformed the gay liberation movement in the US.
In addition to the parade and the exhibition at Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, this year’s event is to feature a market on the weekend of Oct. 15, organizers said.
The first official Taiwan Pride parade was held on Nov. 1, 2003, in Taipei’s Ximending (西門町) area, and the event attracted a record 200,000 participants in 2019.
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