This continued until 1989, when Cleveland Pride began organizing annual Pride events in downtown Cleveland and continued to do so until 2016 when the organization abruptly canceled the events. After the early years of Pride in Cleveland in the 1970s sponsored by numerous organizations, gay community members and organizers in Cleveland elected to join the larger Pride celebrations in Columbus, Ohio through the 1980s. Over the years, many different organizations have sponsored and coordinated the Pride celebrations, leading to years in which a lack of coordination led to multiple separate events, as well as years in which there were no Pride events in the city at all. Cleveland’s gay community in the 1970s organized itself in order to do the same. in 1970 to commemorate the gay, lesbian, and transgender people who resisted their continued harassment and discrimination by the police at Stonewall. Pride celebrations began to occur annually in cities across the U.S. The gay community in Cleveland in the 1970s was connected to the larger gay liberation movement growing in the United States, which was propelled by the Stonewall Riot in New York City in 1969. PRIDE IN CLEVELAND has been celebrated by the city’s LGBTQ community since the early 1970s.
