From 25 July to 8 August 2026, Amsterdam will host WorldPride for the first time, bringing together the international Pride movement. The event coincides with two anniversaries: 25 years of marriage equality in the Netherlands and 30 years since the first Canal Parade. While Pride events around the world often grew out of protest marches for equal rights and against discrimination, Amsterdam developed a distinctive form of its own: a parade on the water.

Behind the colourful boats, packed canals and celebratory atmosphere lies a history of struggle, visibility and change. Ahead of WorldPride Amsterdam, OUTtv is exploring the event's history, context and meaning in three parts. This second instalment follows the modest network of Pride organisers that laid the foundations for WorldPride, and the ways in which each host city has reshaped the international stage and given it new meaning.

It began with a floor full of overnight guests

The story of WorldPride begins not under the spotlights, but in activist Marsha H. Levine's studio in Boston. In October 1982, sixteen Pride organisers from six US cities gathered there. Twelve stayed the night and found a place to sleep on the floor. There was no blueprint for an international movement. There were simply people with questions, experience and a determination to help one another move forward.

Their challenges were familiar. How do you organise a safe march? How do you bring a city council on board? And how do you stop the celebration from drowning out the political message? By sharing knowledge, they ensured that every city did not have to start again from scratch. The meetings continued, people from other countries joined them, and InterPride grew out of the network.

As the network expanded, so did its ambition: what if local Pride movements could create a single international stage together? In 1997, the member organisations established the WorldPride title and selected Rome to host the first edition in 2000.

Celebrating when visibility is under pressure

The first edition in Rome immediately showed how much tension such a stage could create. WorldPride coincided with the Catholic Jubilee and faced fierce opposition from the Vatican and conservative politicians. Even so, members of the LGBTQIA+ community took to the streets. WorldPride became both celebration and protest: a claim to visibility in the heart of the city.

Six years later, there was even less room to manoeuvre in Jerusalem. Armed conflict and security concerns led to the cancellation of the planned large-scale march, although talks, films and exhibitions continued. A smaller parade eventually took place. The event was not what organisers had hoped for, but neither did it disappear. It showed that visibility can take more forms than one major procession.

While Rome and Jerusalem had mainly faced pressure and circumstances from outside, London encountered its greatest obstacle within the organisation itself in 2012. Shortly before the parade, much of the programme was cancelled because of financial and organisational problems. Floats and vehicles were removed, and the planned events in Soho did not go ahead. Veterans of London's first Pride in 1972 led the march. With much of the planned spectacle gone, its protest roots came through more strongly. People refused to let the march disappear, despite their disappointment with the organisation.

That more stripped-back, political form also had a downside. Activist Peter Tatchell pointed out that, without vehicles, older participants and disabled people found it harder to take part. London therefore revealed two truths at once: less spectacle can bring the political message to the fore, but it does not automatically make an event more accessible.

Toronto took a broader approach in 2014. The first WorldPride in North America combined marches and culture with an international human rights conference. One participant from Suriname described how important it was for people from countries where they could not speak freely to be given a voice there. The experience showed that the word 'world' must mean more than visitors or flags: it is also about what someone can take home with them.

A bigger stage, with more voices

As WorldPride grew, the conversation changed too. In Madrid, the city centre became a vast shared space for meeting, music and visibility in 2017. At the same time, the Madrid Summit, an international conference on LGBTQIA+ human rights, brought together activists, experts and organisations from different countries. The political meaning was not pushed to the fringes of the celebration. Celebration and debate about freedom were part of the same programme.

Madrid had shown how WorldPride could bring an entire city together. In New York, that international visibility carried a different weight in 2019, when the event marked exactly fifty years since the Stonewall uprising. The city did more than celebrate how large Pride had become; it also asked how much of the original protest remained visible. That debate quite literally followed two routes: alongside the official parade, the Queer Liberation March moved through the city without corporate sponsors or police contingents taking part in the march.

Those two routes through the same city told a larger story. For some, sponsors provide money and reach; for others, they risk smoothing away Pride's sharper political edge. WorldPride offered no definitive answer, but it made the difference visible. Perhaps that is precisely the strength of an international stage: people do not need to share the same idea of progress to claim space alongside one another.

The format continued to evolve as well. Copenhagen and Malmö shared the hosting duties across two cities and two countries in 2021, while the coronavirus pandemic moved part of the programme online. Sydney brought WorldPride to the Southern Hemisphere for the first time in 2023. The programme made deliberate space for LGBTQIA+ people from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The global stage therefore became not only geographically broader, but more culturally diverse: voices from different communities, backgrounds and experiences were given greater prominence.

In Washington, D.C., the question of how free visibility can truly feel returned in 2025. The event took place as the rights and protections of LGBTQIA+ people, and trans people in particular, were under pressure in the United States. For some international participants and groups, making the journey no longer felt straightforward. People nevertheless came together to celebrate, connect and protest. For some, joining the march was a celebration; for others, the same step felt like an act of resistance.

What all these editions teach us is that Pride is never only a celebration or only a protest. It is a place where people from across the LGBTQIA+ community, with different identities, orientations, backgrounds and experiences, can be visible and find one another. They remember how rights were won and show what still needs to change. Sometimes joy itself is the message; at other times, simply being present becomes an act of resistance. Pride is at its strongest when these forms can exist side by side and less visible groups also have a say.

WorldPride has grown from a practical network, formed at a small gathering in a studio, into a diverse global stage that can take many forms. Precisely because the stage can change shape, its original idea remains recognisable: people come together because no one should have to carry the struggle alone. WorldPride is therefore not an endpoint, but a promise renewed each time.

In part three, OUTtv looks at how Amsterdam will try to fulfil that promise in 2026.