Tens of thousands of people from the LGBTQ+ community and their allies came out for the first big Pride festivities in Northampton, Massachusetts since before COVID, according MassLive.com, which reported:
About 50 formal marching groups stepped off from Sheldon Field on Bridge Street at 11 a.m. headed toward the Hampshire Pride event in the Armory Street parking lot.
But even before the 11 a.m. step-off, downtown Northampton began to fill up.
Parade Director Clay Pearson said his group, Hampshire Pride, took on the organization of what should be the 41th-anniversary parade in January after the predecessor organization abandoned the project. However, due to two years of COVID-19 shutdown, and a couple more years of organizational inertia by the past group, Hampshire Pride 2023 is the 37th parade, Pearson said.
When he took it on, Pearson said he hoped the new organization and the four-year lag in events didn’t dampen enthusiasm for the parade. The organizers just took it on faith it would work.
“We actually never did ask anyone to join the parade,” Pearson said. “We are a new group, and we did not have the bandwidth to ask thousands of people. All we did was put up a Facebook page and people came to us asking to join in. We got grassroots organic growth and the people who are seeking out pride are the ones that got us to where we are now.”
Read the complete story on MassLive.com.
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