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Cologne Pride

Our city's Pride parade is one of our favorite festivals each year. We can celebrate our love, be proud of our sexuality, (re)connect with old friends, get to know new people. So when all pride parades had to be canceled due to COVID-19, we understood the decision, but it also made us incredibly sad.

Yet, our parade wasn't canceled, but modified and postponed to October 11 and thereby coincided with the National Coming Out Day that was originally celebrated in the US, but nowadays around the world. We assume the organizers hoped for an end of the pandemic—as so many of us did. The second wave of the pandemic currently intensifies and we weren't sure if our Pride would really happen this year. But it did. We didn't have parade floats and masses of local, national, and international participants. Instead, we had a physically distanced bicycle parade in which everyone of us participated. Starting from four different locations, hundreds of queer people demonstrated LGBTQ+ visibility.

Of course we were wondering if we should participate. If a pride parade is necessary during a pandemic. But as one of the organizers highlighted: it is! Maybe even more than ever. All over the world, we have worrying developments that do particularly threaten queer people. It's important to show solidarity, to show that we won't stay quiet while other people in our community are discriminated, tortured, killed.

This wasn't our favorite Pride. It was cold and windy; we couldn't embrace old and new friends as we would have done without COVID-19. It wasn’t a party-like celebration—it was a true protest. And it might be one of the most important Prides we ever have and ever will have attended.
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Location: Cologne, Germany

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