If you were hoping to watch a gay pride parade in Boston this year, you are out of luck. Boston Pride, the organization that has organized Boston’s parade every June for over 50 years, disbanded last year after a boycott led by other organizations.
Boston Pride’s struggles started in 2015, when Black Lives Matter protesters disrupted that year’s pride parade with a list of 11 demands for Boston Pride specifically and 11 more demands for the “Boston LGBTQ community” at large.
In addition to demanding “more diversity in the board of directors for Boston Pride,” the protesters also called for the “funding allocated to Black and Latino Pride events [to] be free of interference from Boston Pride’s predominately white board.”
Protesters predictably demanded that “mainstream LGBTQ organizations hire more LGBTQ leaders of color in senior management positions.” But they also called on the group’s leaders to “come out publicly against holding the 2024 Olympics in Boston” because the Olympics would “bring unprecedented gentrification, surveillance, cutting of social services and punitive policing to our city.”
Then in 2020, after George Floyd’s murder, 80% of Boston Pride’s volunteer workforce quit when the organization released a statement on police brutality that failed to use the specific phrase “black lives matter.” Former volunteers alleged that a version of the statement they drafted had included the words “black lives matter,” but that the Boston Pride board of directors removed it.
“There is no accountability process for board members,” Jo Trigilio, a former parade grand marshal and a member of the pride communications team, told WBUR. “They aren’t accountable to anyone.”
Boston Pride then tried to solve the problem by hiring “diversity and inclusion” consultants to help guide the organization through the “transformational changes regarding diversity and inclusion” that were affecting the organization. But that wasn’t enough.
New organizations, including Pride 4 The People, Trans Resistance, and Boston Black Pride, organized a boycott of Boston Pride in December 2020. They said they would not end the boycott until the entire board of directors resigned and the organization rewrote its bylaws.
That never happened. Instead, the board president announced that Boston Pride was dissolving entirely and the organization would no longer be organizing any events or programming. While the newer organizations did host some events this June, none of them were able to assume Boston Pride’s mantle and host a parade.
It may be tempting for conservatives to celebrate the end of a gay pride parade, but the same woke forces tearing apart Boston’s gay community are tearing apart formerly productive organizations all over the country. Hopefully, not every organization shares Boston Pride’s fate.
