New York City: The Last March

The World Traveller Series — Entry No. 4

by Brett Hayhoe

I have landed at JFK Airport more times than I can count. More than twice a year for over a decade — business, pleasure, Pride, all of the above. And every single time, as the wheels touch down and the cabin stirs back to life, I feel something that I can only describe as coming home. There are exactly two airports in the world that do this to me. JFK is one. Tullamarine — Melbourne, Australia, where I actually live — is the other.

I told that to Alan once, my co-President at InterPride, and he understood it immediately. New York does that to people. It claims you. And in June 2019, it claimed five million of us at once.

This was WorldPride NYC — Stonewall 50. The first WorldPride ever held on American soil, timed to mark half a century since the night in Greenwich Village when everything changed. It was also, though I tried not to dwell on it too much in the moment, my final WorldPride as Co-President of InterPride. The end of a chapter. New York, at least, was not going to let it end quietly.

I had actually been the year before — a site inspection with several of my board, walking the venues and the routes and the logistics of what it takes to host five million people. Which meant that when 2019 arrived, New York didn’t feel like a destination so much as a plan finally coming to life. I already knew which piers caught the evening light. I already knew how the city sounded when it was getting ready for something big. I just hadn’t yet seen it at full volume.

THE CITY THAT KNOWS HOW TO THROW A PARTY

New York City Pride — Heritage of Pride, as the organisation is formally known — pulled out every stop. Every single one. In the days before the parade, the city felt like it was running at a frequency slightly higher than normal, the way it does when it knows it’s being watched by the world and decides to put on a show accordingly.

The events were extraordinary and many, which is how New York prefers things.

There was an evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the Met, no less, one of the great cultural monuments of the world — opened for a reception that packed its magnificent halls with Pride leaders, activists, artists and advocates from every corner of the globe. I found myself in conversation with Stuart Milk, nephew of Harvey Milk — the iconic San Francisco politician and civil rights leader assassinated in 1978 — who carries his uncle’s legacy forward with quiet, remarkable grace. Standing in the Met, in New York, in 2019, on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, talking with Stuart Milk: there are moments that you file away immediately, knowing they belong to a category marked this actually happened.

There were cocktail events at a spectacular multi-level venue in downtown Manhattan — the kind of New York space that manages to feel both enormous and intimate, where you could spend an hour on one floor and discover an entirely different party on the next. There was a dance party on a pier on the Hudson River, the Manhattan skyline lit and shimmering across the water, the music carrying out over the river into the warm June night. There was, if memory serves, a party on a boat on the Hudson too — because when New York decides to celebrate, it does not restrict itself to land.

And there was Pride Island — the city’s flagship outdoor music festival, held at Pier 97 in Hudson River Park — where Kylie Minogue performed for the Pride community in one of those rare U.S. appearances that felt genuinely historic. An Australian icon, on a pier on the Hudson, in front of a crowd that knew every word. As a fellow Australian, I felt an entirely disproportionate sense of pride about this.

THE MARCH

But everything — all of it, the receptions and the river parties and the glittering downtown venues — was prologue to the march itself.

On the day of the WorldPride parade, I took my place in the lead contingent. This is not a small thing. The lead contingent at a WorldPride parade is reserved for dignitaries, officials, heads of organisations — the people whose work, year after year, makes the event possible. To march at the front of a parade of five million people through the streets of New York City, on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, knowing it is the last time you will do so in this role, is an experience for which I find I still do not have quite the right words.

The streets were packed beyond anything I had previously witnessed, and I have witnessed a great deal. The sound was physical — cheering, music, drums, voices — a wall of human joy that you walk into rather than simply hear. Fifth Avenue, lined ten deep, a city that had opened its arms as wide as they go and invited the world in.

I thought about Harvey Milk, who had marched in very different circumstances in this same city. I thought about what it had taken to get from there to here — fifty years of courage, grief, activism, setback, and stubborn, glorious persistence. And I thought, not for the first time in my life but perhaps most clearly in that moment, about what a privilege it is to be present at history.

My final march as Co-President of InterPride was through the streets of New York, at the front of the largest Pride event ever held on the planet.

It was, to put it plainly, the perfect ending.

THE SUMMARY

Where: New York City — Midtown, Greenwich Village, Hudson River, downtown Manhattan
When: WorldPride NYC 2019, June — also Stonewall 50
Why it matters: The largest LGBTQ+ celebration in history, drawing five million people; the first WorldPride held in the United States; the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising
Don’t miss: The Met (any visit, any reason); the Hudson River waterfront at dusk; Greenwich Village and the Stonewall Inn; the NYC Pride March if you’re ever in the city in late June
The vibe: Monumental, electric, deeply moving — New York at its most generous and most itself
Who was there: Five million people, Stuart Milk, Kylie Minogue, and one Australian who felt completely at home

The World Traveller Series is published in Q Magazine and on ‘Ask Brett‘. Entry No. 3 — Madrid, WorldPride 2017 — is available now.