Since 2014, Stichting Pride Amsterdam has successfully organised the annual Pride in Amsterdam. Stichting Pride Amsterdam is the hub connecting organisations and businesses that collaborate to make the festival happen. The festival is shaped by the following committees: Hospitality, Boat Parade, Pride Walk, Arts & Culture, Sport Pride, Women & Pride, Youth Pride, Senior Pride, Trans Pride, Religion Pride, Fetish Pride and Corporate Pride. These committees focus on programming tailored to their communities and increase visibility for those groups.
Stichting Pride Amsterdam is a non-profit organisation that strives for emancipation, social, civic and legal equality and acceptance of gay, bisexual and lesbian people and of those who do not or cannot conform to socially dominant gender roles (such as masculine women, feminine men and queers) or whose sex assigned at birth does not match how they feel (such as transgender people). Visibility of diversity is essential to achieve this.What you see can’t be ignored.
Pride Amsterdam is more than an event. It symbolises the open and tolerant city we strive to be. We celebrate the freedom to be yourself. For twenty years the boat parade has been an inseparable part of Amsterdam and is now firmly embedded in our city centre.
Eberhard van der Laan
Former Mayor of Amsterdam
With these words the late Mayor Eberhard van der Laan repeatedly expressed how important Pride was to his city. And it matters not only for the capital, but also for the reputation of liberal Netherlands as a whole.
Since its inception in 1996 our Pride has grown into a multi-day festival and become one of the finest and largest celebrations of its kind worldwide. The city turns into a rainbow of events with dance parties, film festivals, sports events, debates and culture, a Pride Walk, a Rainbow Park, and on the final weekend multiple outdoor stages bring the house down.
The annual highlight is of course the world-famous and unique Canal Parade, a colourful procession of 80 boats and hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic, colourfully dressed visitors. Nowhere else in the world is Pride celebrated on the water on this scale as in Amsterdam. It’s an experience every LGBTQ person should witness at least once. After a 6 km route and two hours of cheering, most international LGBTQ activists leave inspired and energised for the emancipation struggle in their own countries.
Stacey Lentz, LGBTQ activist and co-owner of the legendary Stonewall Inn Café in New York, after her visit to the world said:
“Pride in Amsterdam is incredible and epic, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The whole city celebrates that you can be who you are. Trans, Bi, Lesbian, Gay, together with straight people and whatever your identity is… everyone joins in… everyone celebrates diversity. Pride truly takes over the whole city here! The message is really about inclusion and you can feel why this was the first country to legalise same-sex marriage and why it leads the way on human rights!”
