Guadalajara Gay Pride

The Guadalajara Pride known in Spanish as Desfile del Orgullo translated as "Parade of the Pride" is an event that celebrates diversity in general and seeks equal rights for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people, is celebrated in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico in 2019 meets its 40th edition.

Guadalajara Pride
Genre	LGBT Parades
Location(s)	Guadalajara Jalisco, Mexico
Years active	40
Founded	June 1979

The parade was founded in 2014 by activist Karina Velasco Michel, after years of fighting for it and after several moves against homophobia in the city of Guadalajara, this city was the first city in the country after Mexico City in which the movement openly gay gushed as well as demonstrations and marches demanding equal rights for the LGBT community. While the first demonstrations in Guadalajara and gay organizations were heavily consolidating in the 1980s severely harassed by then ultra-conservative government, currently the event is a well known and respectable gay parade in the world and every year dissemination and quality are observed during every edition.

This gay parade in Guadalajara, is one of the most leading prides in Latin America along with cities such as Mexico City, São Paulo and Buenos Aires. This event is celebrated every antepenult week of June The Guadalajara Pride celebrations are usually preluded by a week of cultural events focused on the LGBT community to promote human rights and practice the right of freedom of speech, this week is called Semana de la diversidad (week of the diversity) and host the famous MIX Festival which is the International LGBT Film Festival of Guadalajara (MIX Festival de Diversidad Sexual en Cine y Video), also several art expositions, conferences, AIDS marathons, concerts and several artistic and cultural activities which are a well known characteristic of Guadalajara city, Guadalajara Pride has the special feature that since 2014 took the emblematic Glorieta de la Minerva as the starting point of the Pride and culminating in Guadalajara main square called Plaza de la Liberación.

History

In Mexico the first openly gay movement was in 1978 when a gay contingent participated in the solidarity march commemorating the tenth anniversary of government repression of the October 2, the first gay pride march was held in Mexico City in 1979 organized by the Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action, the autonomous group Oikabeth Lesbian and the Gay Liberation group LAMBDA.

1983 saw the birth of the Gay Pride group GOHL led by Pedro Preciado, a tapatio activist who decided to create this group after the discriminatory and arbitrary arrests and harassment of homosexuals by the Metropolitan Police during the Flavio Romero de Velasco government period, which was characterized by repression of the gay community in the 1980s. The first movement was organized by GOHL the same year in the summer of 1983 in protest of the atmosphere of hostility and repression that violated the civil rights of thousands of homosexuals in the city of Guadalajara. Both this and the rest of the movements and events that GOHL tried to organize were backed by the government of Romero de Velasco, and for almost fifteen years public demonstrations in support of homosexual groups were repressed by the government, though some cultural days and events were held during those years.

Years later in 1991 the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), which is a global partnership that works with the United Nations Organization and the European Union to promote the rights of homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender people in the world, proposed to the city of Guadalajara to host the international conference for lesbian and gays this event takes place yearly in major world capitals, but the proposal was truncated by strong opposition from the groups in power at that time headed by State government and the four municipalities of the metropolitan area ruled by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and the conservative church led by Archbishop Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo.