Festival · July
Christopher Street Day (Frankfurt Pride)
Christopher Street Day is what Germany calls Pride, named after the New York street where the Stonewall uprising began. Frankfurt's edition runs for three days in July and mixes a parade, a street party and a political rally.
American visitors will recognize the origin story, because it is theirs. On the night of June 27 to 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street at 7th Avenue in New York. This time the guests fought back, and the neighborhood of Greenwich Village stood with them. Out of that came the Gay Liberation Front and, in memory of those nights, an annual march. Germany adopted the name Christopher Street Day rather than Pride, so CSD is what you will see on every poster and banner here.
The German timing was its own story. The Stonewall news arrived just as the community here was reorganizing, after the loosening of Paragraph 175, the law that criminalized homosexual relationships. Ten years after Greenwich Village, the first organized CSD march took place. Roughly 400 people marched in Berlin, many of them masked for fear of reprisals, under the slogan Gay Pride.
Frankfurt has been holding its CSD for decades, and today it is a large, loud, costumed parade rather than a small protest march. Attendance across the German CSDs has grown from tens of thousands in the early 1990s into the millions. Nobody masks up anymore, and the political core is still there under the glitter.
The centerpiece is Saturday. The parade forms up on the Römerberg, decked in rainbow colors, and takes two and a half hours to wind through downtown before ending at the Konstablerwache. The mayor opens the CSD officially at 3pm. One moment stands apart every year: a minute of silence for those who have died of AIDS. Anyone who wants to march has to register in advance. If you only want to watch, get there early, because the good spots go fast.
Around the parade there is a full program: stage shows, open-air dancing, live music ranging from dance-pop to German Schlager, musical cabaret, drag performances and karaoke. Information stands from the city's LGBTQ organizations line the info street, where the legendary stiletto race starts at 7pm on Saturday. The bars and clubs downtown carry the party through to early morning.
The motto of the Frankfurt CSD is Grenzen überwinden, Brücken schlagen, meaning overcoming borders and building bridges, which is a fair summary of the weekend.
