Every year Munich celebrates Christopher Street Day, an event dedicated to the LGBT community in our city. It culminates with the Munich Pride march, which this year was particularly interesting.

As usual, the parade was colourful, loud and filled up with hundreds of smiles. The music was boosting from the vehicles, and the rainbow flags were waved high and proud. But what made it particularly interesting, was the fact that more people were attending and watching than any other Munich Pride we have attended.

The participants and all the folks that decided to spare some time to support diversity or simply enjoy the party were not only the participants.  On both sides of the march route streets, people were lining up to cheer the procession, take photos and hug the marchers. There were whole families with kids, homosexual and heterosexual couples, young and old, bold and long-haired…  A true diversity.

Now, Munich is a pretty LGBT-friendly city. The community is strong, and it is quite a usual sight for homosexual couples to walk down the street holding hands. There were no harsh looks or harassments, which gay couples usually face in other cities in Europe.

To give you an idea of how treasured is the LGBT community here, I have to tell you that all major political parties were represented in the Munich Pride. No, not by preaching their political views and values, but by marching side by side with the different LGBT societies. Many tech giants were walking and waving the rainbow flag – Google, Microsoft, HP Enterprise etc.

It seems to me that more and more people nowadays are realizing that love is love and diversity should be celebrated, not persecuted. I wish I could see this happening more and more in other parts of this world.

I have shot a short video reportage with my GoPro, and you can view it below. However, readers in Germany might not be able to check it out. It seems that one of the LGBT societies was playing Whatever Will Be (Que Sera Sera) by Doris Day and YouTube flagged it as a copyright-protected content. I’ve made some changes and let’s see if GEMA will be satisfied…

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