Taiwan’s LGBT Pride Parade took place on Saturday, October 29th in Taipei with the theme of Equal Marriage. It was massive, and probably not an exaggeration to say there were hundreds of thousands of people involved. Media estimates say 80,000+ people, but I think that’s a lowball number – I know, I was there. There were enough people that it required splitting into a north route and south route, both of which took hours to pass. (The 2015 parade was also split in two.)
It’s arguably the largest pride parade in Asia, notable because of Taiwan’s relatively small population, under 24 million. It’s not just North American and European ex-pats who make up the numbers, people from many Asian countries travel to Taiwan for the parade, countries which are as not as enlightened as Taiwan when it comes to human rights for LGBTQIA people. Thailand, Japan and South Korea may be, but not Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and some others. They could have held an ASEAN conference here by the number of national flags I saw.
The only thing that I didn’t like was having to leave early. My employer decided to have a haunted house event at the school on Saturday night. And then there’s the two Hallowe’en parties I went to after that, leaving the first at three and staying until dawn at the other. Oh, my poor aching head, I am getting too old for this.
Here are some news items about the parade. I don’t have the time to post photos right now (they will take too long to upload), but I will in a second post later tonight.
Tens of thousands march in Taipei’s LGBT pride parade
Apple Daily (Chinese language only) coverage of the parade
Bye for now, darlings.