Culminating the Athens Pride Week, Athens Pride Day is due to be celebrated tomorrow (June 9, 2012) at Klafthmonos Square of Athens with a major parade. This year’s Pride Week had a special slogan “Love me, It’s Free”. This year’s slogan, organizers say, stresses that the values that fortify a society are priceless. Yet they cost absolutely nothing.
MÄNNER-MINNE, Berlin’s first gay men’s choir, will open the Athens Pride Parade at 5 p.m. on Saturday. Known for its colorful musical and choreographic diversity, the German choir has participated in almost every European Lesbian & Gay choir festival and many in the United States.
Athens Pride started as as small grassroots initiative gathering a few hundred activists in 2005 and quickly grew to become one of the most popular and most significant all-day events of the city. With a parade attracting over 12,000 people in 2012, it is the largest pride event in SE Europe. Regardless of this growth and success, Athens Pride retains its grassroots, all volunteer, non-profit character.
Athens Pride is unlike any other in many ways. Take one example: for the past 3 years an auction named “Artists for Athens Pride” has provided most of the funding for Athens Pride, enabling it to produce free public cultural and political events that are enjoyed by thousands. This extraordinary display of sensitivity and consciousness on the part of artists in Greece and abroad has made Athens Pride unique, as it is the only Pride in the world to be primarily supported by the visual arts community.
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