City celebrates LGBT equality with huge showing at gay pride parade

Fifth Avenue was loud, proud and colorful Sunday as thousands took in the beautiful weather to celebrate the city's annual gay pride parade, which took place a day after the 45th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village.

Marchers included dancers in elaborately feathered carnival costumes, celebrants on roller skates and motorcycles and people with wreaths of multicolored balloons.

"It makes a difference when you have such a big crowd and everyone is unified. It becomes a large event that everyone around the world recognizes," said Joey Nicholson, 33, a librarian from Murray Hill.

More than 1 million people attended and participated in the march, which wound through midtown Manhattan to the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, the site of the 1969 police raid and subsequent rioting that marked the start of the American gay-rights movement.

The grand marshals this year were actress Laverne Cox, the transgender star of the hit Netflix drama, "Orange is the New Black"; Rea Carey, the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force; and stage and film actor Jonathan Groff, who is also an LGBTQ activist.

Openly gay City Councilman Daniel Dromm (D-Queens) said he's been attending the parade for 41 years, since he was 18.

"Every time I come just reinvigorates me . . . and it's enough energy to last me the whole year," he said.

Yesterday's parade was the third citywide march since the state legalized same-sex marriage.

Marni Halasa, 48, of Chelsea, wearing a bridal veil and in-line skates, brandished a sign that read, "Everyone deserves the freedom to marry."

She said New York was among just 19 states to legalize same-sex marriage.

"We have a long way to go," she said. "The whole nation has to get on board."

Her skating partner, Chris Lipari, 54, wore a Boy Scout uniform and said he believes the fight to permit openly gay troop leaders to serve in the scouts is the next gay rights challenge to overcome.

Elected officials who marched in the parade included Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.

Before the parade, which has often served to increase AIDS and HIV awareness in the LGBT community, Cuomo's office announced a three-pronged Bending the Curve initiative to reduce HIV infections among New Yorkers.

New York State was "in many ways was ground zero of the HIV and AIDS crisis when it started about 30 years ago," Cuomo said. "I think it's fitting that New York should then be the state that is the most aggressive in eradicating this disease and actually ending this disease."

The "Bending the Curve" program would attempt to identify people with HIV who are undiagnosed and link them to health care, get diagnosed people on anti-HIV therapy to keep them in good health and prevent further transmission, and provide access to pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PREP, to high-risk people to keep them HIV-negative. Cuomo said before the parade he hopes HIV will no longer by an epidemic by 2020, and eradication will be in sight.