The original St. Patrick’s Day parade on Staten Island will welcome L.G.B.T.Q. groups for the first time in its 60-year history, ending a standoff between the borough’s gay community and the committee that organizes the parade.
Organizers invited the Pride Center of Staten Island, a nonprofit community group, to march in the celebration on March 2, 2025. The invitation followed a change in leadership within the committee that runs the parade, according to SILive.com, which first reported the change.
At a news conference on Tuesday, the group’s new leader, Edward Patterson, said mounting pressure to make the parade more inclusive had persuaded the group to change its policy.
“Quite simply, it’s just time,” Mr. Patterson said. “People stepped up with a change in mind-set that, frankly, wanted the controversy to go away.”
The Pride Center’s inclusion is a hard-won victory for L.G.B.T.Q. activists on Staten Island and beyond who had protested the parade’s policy for decades. The New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade, a much larger event held in Manhattan, lifted a two-decade ban on L.G.B.T.Q. groups in 2014.
Though the Pride Center is the only group so far to receive an invitation to the Staten Island event, organizers suggested Tuesday that they would be open to welcoming more L.G.B.T.Q. delegations.
In a statement, Carol Bullock, the Pride Center’s executive director, said the group was honored and excited to be part of the event, which she called “a time-honored tradition that brings people together from all walks of life to celebrate Irish culture.”
Elected officials celebrated the change as a step forward for the borough and its L.G.B.T.Q. residents.
“We are thrilled that, this year, Staten Island’s L.G.B.T.Q.+ community will finally be welcome to march under their own banner in the Richmond County St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and we applaud the committee for coming to this decision, which was a long time coming,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement.
At the news conference, Kamillah Hanks, a Democratic City Council member who represents Staten Island’s north shore, said that for her, the committee’s decision was personal: Her transgender stepdaughter, who is half Irish, will be able to participate in the celebration for the first time.
“This is an emotional thing for me, because it matters. Inclusion matters,” Ms. Hanks said. “Now this parade will truly represent all Staten Islanders.”
David Carr, a Republican City Council member from Staten Island who is gay, said at the news conference that ending the exclusionary policy was “proof that the issue of sexual orientation no longer divides us.”
Local lawmakers, including Mayor Adams and his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, had boycotted the event in recent years over its exclusion of gay groups, which the parade’s organizers had said did not belong at a celebration of a Catholic saint. In 2020, organizers barred prominent locals they felt had displayed support for L.G.B.T.Q. causes, including Miss Staten Island, who had come out as bisexual, and a Republican City Council member who had affixed a small rainbow-flag pin to his jacket.
Early this year, Mayor Adams announced a second St. Patrick’s Day parade on Staten Island that included L.G.B.T.Q. groups. The second parade was organized by the nonprofit Staten Island Business Outreach Center and took place two weeks after the original.
There will be just one unified parade next year. At the news conference, Ms. Bullock heralded the 2024 parade, in which her group participated, as an example of what an inclusive Staten Island St. Patrick’s Day celebration could look like.
“Knowing how much the community supported us with the second parade, I know the feeling that everyone else is going to have out there now,” Ms. Bullock said. “That’s the most gratifying thing.”
Brendan Fay, an Irish immigrant who has been calling for the inclusion of L.G.B.T.Q. groups and leaders in Irish cultural events for decades, said the change signaled a new era of inclusivity and progress in the city’s most conservative borough.
“It is significant,” he said. “Catholic parades and cultural events are meaningful. They send messages.”
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