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Aurora, Illinois
June 17
On Father’s Day, Illinois’ second-largest city will throw its first-ever Pride parade, and this one did face some opposition. Organizers filled out their permit paperwork back in November, but were held up until early 2018 by a small religious group voicing small religious objections.
“They were using a lot of coded language, I think basically they were afraid it was going to be some sort of debauched bacchanalia,” says parade coordinator Gwyn Ciesla, the organizer who applied for the parade permit.
The real tea is that Aurora’s celebration is in fact predicated on being “G-rated” -- Ciesla says the organizers want the celebration to center student groups from middle schools and high schools. They also expect about one-sixth of the marchers to come from churches and synagogues. Attendance predictions range from 5,000 to as high as 9,000. In accordance with modern American tradition, they are attempting to cover this via a GoFundMe.
“It’ll reflect the Aurora community in that, in addition to being youth-focused, it’ll be pretty ethnically and religiously diverse,” Ciesla says. “We have a large Latinx population and also a large Muslim population, so it’ll be a rainbow in that sense, too.”
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