Mayor Walsh Kicks off Boston Pride Week, with Help from Pussy Riot

Photo by Kyle Clauss

Mayor Marty Walsh kicked off the 45th Boston Pride Week, raising the rainbow flag over City Hall Plaza with help from veterans of the Stonewall riots and Russian feminist punk-rockers Pussy Riot.

“This week’s celebration is not just of identity, but of community, love, and equality,” Walsh said, flanked by parade marshals. “So check out the great events that are happening this week, so we can let the world know we have Boston pride.”

Walsh said he recently spoke to his cousin in Ireland, which on May 22 became the first country to introduce marriage equality though a ballot initiative. He told her about the similar fight in Massachusetts 11 years earlier, when Walsh was a state representative.

“I told her of, at that time, the contention that was going on, and many of you, as I look around, man of walking the halls of the Statehouse, and the concern and the fear, and everything that was going on,” Walsh said. “And I think, 11 years later, how that is like a distant memory, that we’re thinking like, ‘How did that ever happen?'”

David Velasco Bermudez, a parade marshall and Stonewall veteran, read aloud a letter from President Barack Obama, who expressed his support for the movement.

“As Stonewall people joined together and declared they had seen enough injustice, while being beaten down, they stood up and challenged not how the world saw them, but also how they saw themselves,” Velasco Bermudez read. “History shows that once that spirit takes hold, little can stand in its way. So the riots gave way to protests, the protests gave way to the movement, and the movement gave way to the transformation that continues today.”

Velasco Bermudez added that he was the first Stonewall veteran married in Massachusetts after same-sex marriage was legalized in 2004. “A New Yorker—can you believe that?” he laughed.