LA Pride: A Los Angeles Tradition Rooted in Community Organizing

LA Pride is Los Angeles’s annual LGBTQ celebration, bringing together a festival and parade under the name commonly used for the event. It is traditionally held on the second weekend of June and is produced by the Christopher Street West Association, a nonprofit organization overseen by an all-volunteer board.

The organization’s origins reach back to 1970, when Rev. Troy Perry, Rev. Bob Humphries and Morris Kight established Christopher Street West Association. Their stated purpose was to organize a gay parade in Los Angeles in commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, which had taken place the previous year in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The group’s name refers to Christopher Street, the Greenwich Village street associated with The Stonewall Inn.

The event’s history therefore links a Los Angeles gathering to a broader moment in LGBTQ history while retaining a specifically local identity. The organization was formed in Los Angeles by community figures connected with religious and liberation movements: Perry founded the Metropolitan Community Church, Humphries founded United States Mission, and Kight founded the Gay Liberation Front.

For several years, Christopher Street West Association operated as an informal group led by volunteers. In 1976, it became incorporated and received 501(c)(3) nonprofit status from the Internal Revenue Service. The association continues to be run by an all-volunteer board of directors, according to the supplied background material.

Beyond producing LA Pride, the association describes its work as creating safe and inclusive settings for self-expression, celebration, and diversity, equity and inclusion within Greater Los Angeles’s LGBTQ community. That framing places the parade and festival within an ongoing community-organizing mission rather than treating them only as a yearly public event.

LA Pride’s established place on the Los Angeles calendar reflects both celebration and remembrance. Its format connects public gathering, local LGBTQ visibility and the legacy of Stonewall, while its organizing structure emphasizes volunteer leadership. For readers seeking the event’s civic and historical context, the Christopher Street West Association is central: it is the organization that helped establish the Los Angeles commemoration and continues to produce the annual celebration.

Source and reuse information This automatically generated backgrounder adapts text from “Los Angeles Pride” on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Pride The adapted text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. The source article’s linked references are provided below where available. This story has not been independently reviewed or fact-checked.

Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://www.npr.org/2017/06/12/532588488/as-pride-marches-take-resistance-stance-where-do-lgbt-trump-supporters-fit-in - https://www.history.com/news/how-activists-plotted-the-first-gay-pride-parades - https://lgbtrc.usc.edu/about/timeline/ - https://worldofwonder.net/the-la-pride-lineup-this-year-is-amazing-and-includes-a-few-wowlebrities/ - https://www.augustnation.com/rev-troy-perry - https://www.advocate.com/politics/2017/3/10/la-pride-replacing-parade-protest-march Image rights Photograph description: Los Angeles, June 1987 Creator: Alan Light. License: CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0). Original image page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ALos_Angeles_Pride_1987_002.jpg. The image was resized for display; no other changes were made.