“Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying silently in our closets…We are coming out.”
– Harvey Milk, gay activist and martyred San Francisco official.

As Harvey Milk recognized during the 1970s, visibility is a necessary and core element of the Gay Rights movement. Each year gay pride festivals are held around the globe with the intent of empowering those in the LGBT community to be proud of their sexual orientation and gender identity, and to increase their visibility within the wider community. Annual pride parades have become a powerful component for these pride festivals, as they are a positive and entertaining way to unite a diverse group of people while bringing out family, friends, and heterosexual supporters in a demonstrative show of solidarity.

With the aspiration of using photography to promote international gay rights and visibility, the new and independently developed “Walk with Pride” project aims to spend over a year documenting pride parades around the globe. Developed by photographer Charles Meacham and blogger Sarah Baxter, “Walk with Pride” takes advantage of social media technologies to link viewers, with a related Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter account. An accompany blog shares updates on the trip, and stories about each community visited.

While imagery often celebrates the colorful atmosphere of parades, the project also intends to showcase the diversity of communities from the provocative to the more reserved, the flamboyantly dressed to the ordinary yet proud. The idea for the project was sparked after attending the 2009 Taipei Pride event, one of the largest LGBT parades in Asia. As the project is freshly started, expect to see an increasing variety concerning pride images and community subcultures as they continue. Some key stops on the intended international journey will be the pride parades held in Sydney, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, New York, Toronto, San Francisco, Mumbai, and São Paulo.

Charles Meacham has already completed several other culture-related photography projects, which has led to over 20 international photography awards, including those from National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, and PDN magazines. Previous writing projects by Sarah Baxter have likewise been culturally focused, and have featured on the community pages of Lonely Planet.com, EthicalTraveler.org, and WildAsia.net.

For those interested in following their progress, visit www.walkwithpridenow.com or http://wwpproject.wordpress.com.

The next march they will be photographing is the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade on Feb. 27, 2010.

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