An Irish LGBT group marches in New York's St Patrick's Day Parade for the first time
Excluded, fired, arrested for 25 years. Then an Irish LGBT group was finally allowed to march in New York.
In the late afternoon of 17 March 2016, a group wearing lavender and green sashes turned from Forty-Eighth Street onto Fifth Avenue in New York. It was the Lavender and Green Alliance. For the first time, it was officially marching in the St Patrick's Day Parade, the city's biggest Irish celebration. Brendan Fay, the group's co-founder, wept with joy.
Behind this moment lay a quarter of a century of conflict. Since the early nineties, Irish lesbians and gay men had not been allowed to march under their own banner. Fay, an immigrant from Ireland, lost his job as a teacher at a Catholic school in Queens in 1991 because he had appeared at the parade with the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization. In the years that followed, he protested again and again at the roadside and was often arrested. In Queens he also founded his own parade, open to everyone.
Only political pressure got things moving. Mayor Bill de Blasio had boycotted the parade for two years. Then the parade committee invited the group. In the end, around three hundred people marched, among them LGBT icon Edie Windsor and de Blasio himself, who walked the whole route alongside them. The conservative Catholic League, on the other hand, stayed away in protest.
At the roadside there were cheers instead of whistles. "This is how it should be," said co-founder Kathleen Walsh D'Arcy. The chairman of the parade committee spoke of the most inclusive parade ever.
Years later, Fay looked back on that afternoon. After twenty-five years of struggle, they had crossed the threshold onto Fifth Avenue with tears and cheers. Hearts and history had changed that day.