2023-07-22 11:12:30
Several hundred thousand people came together in Berlin on Sunday for Christopher Street Day. In a colorful train with around 70 themed floats, the participants of the traditional rally of gays and lesbians and other queer people wanted to pull through the city center to the festival mile between the Victory Column and the Brandenburg Gate.
The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) wished the participants in the short message service Twitter a happy celebration. “Diversity is our strength,” he said.
In the morning, the German Minister of State for Culture, Claudia Roth (Greens), raised the rainbow flag, the international symbol of the gay and lesbian movement, in front of the Federal Chancellery. It also blew on the Reichstag building, the seat of the Bundestag. The flag is also “an order that there is still a lot to be done politically for more equality and anti-discrimination,” wrote Bundestag Vice President Katrin Göring-Eckardt (Greens) on Twitter – and added: “Love is for everyone!”
The organizers expected around 500,000 participants at the rally – significantly more than last year, when around 350,000 people took part in Christopher Street Day in Berlin. This year’s rally has the motto “Be their voice and ours – for more empathy and solidarity”. It will be held in the city for the 45th time.
The organizers expressly want the CSD to be understood as a political rally. “Our catalog of demands will find its way, politicians, business and civil society can’t avoid it – we’re not here for fun,” explained Patrick Ehrhardt, board member of the Berlin CSD eV According to the organizers, all queer people belong to the CSD – i.e. people who don’t want to fit into the heterosexual male-female pattern.
The program also includes political speeches – for example by Bundestag President Bärbel Bas (SPD) and Berlin’s new mayor Kai Wegner (CDU). “We raise the voice for the people who belong to the community and we protest once morest prejudice, exclusion and violence,” explained Wegner at the start of the CSD. “The Berlin CSD has meanwhile become one of the largest European demonstrations for the human right to self-determined love and is thus giving a sign of hope for better coexistence.”
The rally commemorates June 28, 1969, when police stormed the Stonewall Inn gay bar on New York’s Christopher Street, followed by days of clashes between activists and security forces. The uprising is considered the birth of the modern gay and lesbian movement.
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