This post was submitted by Hans

If you were anywhere near DC this past weekend, there’s probably no way you missed the 200,000 LGBTs and straight allies marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was quite a sight, I’m not gonna lie, and in case you missed it (or want to relive it), here’s what I managed to catch -

The speakers and entertainers on stage, in the same order as they appear in the slide show -

Washington Gay Men’s Chorus
Rev. Troy Perry, reading a letter of solidarity from Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Kip Williams and Robin McGhee
David Mixner
Cynthia Nixon
Judy Shepard
Lt. Dan Choi
Lady Gaga
Billie Myers and Dave Koz
Staceyann Chin
Julian Bond

If that looked like a peaceful, love-filled, drama-free day of activism, that’s because it pretty much was. The night before, however, it was a slightly different scene outside of the HRC Annual Dinner at the Washington Convention Center…

The Bill O’Reillys and Glenn Becks of the world tried to paint this as gays vs gays vs Obama, and to an extent it was. Many of us are pissed off at the silence coming out of the White House and the halls of Congress, and the apparent inability of HRC to do anything about it with the millions of queer dollars funneled into their coffers apart from throwing glitzy dinners for the homo-elite. Shocker. But there were only two points of real tension that night – the appearance of the “God Hates Fags” crowd, which took just about all of the attention off of HRC, and President Obama’s motorcycle escort, which drove up onto the sidewalk and forcibly shoved the crowd back until an impromptu sit-down protest broke out. It wasn’t the biggest protest I’ve seen by a long shot, but it packed a hell of a lot of action into one short hour.

Got any photos from this weekend you’d like to share with TNG? Join our Flickr pool!

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