Counting Crowds

After a year that saw historic levels of anti-LGBTQ+ protest activity, legislative action, and online jawboning, millions of people turned out in May and June 2023 for hundreds of LGBTQ+ pride celebrations across all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

Specifically, Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) has logged more than 470 LGBTQ+ pride marches, rallies, festivals, parades, and even bike rides since the start of May 2023 through the first weekend of July, and we continue to add others as our research process uncovers them. So far, we only have estimates of crowd sizes for 158 of those events, or about one-third of them. Across just those 158 events, though, we tallied nearly 5.9 million participants, give or take a million and a half. Seven of the 10 largest pride events in the U.S. this year fell on the last weekend in June, the traditional peak of pride season, and they spanned the entire country: from New York City on the East Coast to Seattle and San Francisco out west, and from Houston and St. Petersburg down south all the way up to Chicago via Denver, Columbus, and St. Louis.*

Across those more than 470 events, we only saw reports of counter-protests at 67 of them, or about 14 percent. We expect that some additional fraction also involved counter-protests that weren’t reported by our sources, but the fact that they weren’t reported implies that those actions were probably small or otherwise not particularly noteworthy.

Of the 67 pride celebrations where counter-protests were reported by our sources, 19 of those counters, or about 28 percent, involved white supremacists and other far-right groups. Of those 19, only four involved Proud Boys, the group that had reportedly threatened on social media to turn Pride Month into Proud Month. Five of the 67 counters involved Patriot Front; another five involved various chapters of White Lives Matter; and five more involved one or more Active Clubs. While these types of groups continue to protest outside drag shows and Drag Story Hours at historic rates, they did not make much of a splash at pride events in 2023.

A smattering of those 67 events saw counter-protests by more than one right-wing extremist group. Consistent with the larger theme of this post, though, the most violent clash we saw around all those several hundred pride events in the past 10 weeks was actually a brawl between two groups of far-right counter-protesters — the Proud Boys and the Rose City Nationalists — that happened blocks away from the targeted pride event in Oregon City, Oregon, on Saturday, June 24.

Meanwhile, we only saw reports of injured participants at two pride events in the past 10 weeks. The first occurred in Bozeman, Montana, on May 20, when a pride celebrant who engaged with a group of white-supremacist counter-protesters outside a Drag Story Hour at a local bookstore got pepper-sprayed and struck. The other occurred in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in early June, when a sign-holding counter-protester responded to parade-goers who approached and verbally confronted him by punching one of them in the face (and then getting arrested). 

Over the past couple of years, a lot of folks — myself included — have focused on telling the story about how the right has ramped up its attacks on LGBTQ+ peoples’ equality and visibility, and how this sustained campaign is harming and even killing people. In a few posts on this blog, I’ve posted versions of the chart below, which shows how anti-LGBTQ+ protest activity has surged since mid-2022, and how that surge still shows no signs of abating. In fact, we can see from this updated version of the chart that anti-LGBTQ+ protest activity leapt to new heights during Pride Month, with more than 150 events in June 2023 alone. We also know that the hostile political climate led to the cancellation or relocation of some pride events or elements of them, and many others invested significant time and money in added security measures.

The threat summarized in that chart is urgent and dire, and while it’s vital that we keep sounding that alarm as long as the threat persists, it’s also important that we show how resilient and joyful queer people and their allies continue to be in the face of that incessant firehose of hostility and hate. So, here’s that same chart juxtaposed with one showing pro-LGBTQ+ protests, demonstrations, rallies, and the like over the same period. The monthly counts for LGBTQ+ rights and equality and liberation consistently dwarf the anti-LGBTQ+ ones, and as the latter have surged, so have the former.

Finally, it’s also notable that, despite — or maybe because of? — the ongoing national wave of right-wing attacks on the queer community, the scope of American LGBTQ+ pride celebrations continues to expand. Of those more than 470 pride events we saw in the past 10 weeks, at least 22 were the first edition of what are meant to be annual events in their towns, and the reported crowd sizes at those first-ever events averaged in the several hundreds.

* CCC only tracks events that are free and open to the public and not solely organized by a local government or government agency. So, these tallies exclude festivals and shows that required paid tickets to enter, as well as flag-raising ceremonies, festivals, and parades exclusively organized by local or county governments. This post was originally published on July 3, 2023. This version was published on July 6, 2023, using updated CCC data that included more events.

In late 2022, I guessed that the surge in anti-LGBTQ+ right-wing protests we saw in the summer and fall of last year would ebb after the elections. Over the past few years, right-wing protests have tended to cycle through focal issues every few months, and I figured that 2022’s flurry of actions targeting the queer community was, for the most part, an instrument funders and organizers were using to try to mobilize voters for the midterms.

I was wrong. As the chart below shows, right-wing activists have maintained the unusually high pace of anti-LGBTQ+ protest activity through the winter and spring of 2023. Since June 2022, CCC has recorded an average of 39 anti-LGBTQ+ protests nationwide each month, compared with just three per month from January 2017 through May 2022. In the first four full months of 2023, we’ve logged an average of nearly 41 anti-LGBTQ+ protests each month, up slightly from the pace set in the latter half of last year.

Notably, this issue also continues to absorb a heightened share of the right’s attention. Since the start of 2022, more than 6 percent of all right-wing protests recorded by CCC nationwide have involved anti-LGBTQ+ claims. That might not sound like a lot, but the share from 2017 until 2022 was just 1.6 percent. In other words, over the past year and a half, right-wing protests have been almost four times as likely to include anti-LGBTQ+ claims as they were in the preceding five years.

As the following chart shows, drag performances and drag culture have been a particular focal point for anti-LGBTQ+ protesters in recent months. Since June 2022, 46 percent of anti-LGBTQ+ protests have referenced drag, compared with just 12 percent from 2017 through May 2022. Roughly half of that 46 percent, or about 22 percent of these hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ events overall, have specifically targeted Drag Story Hour readings for children.

Also notable — and evident in the chart below — is the increased presence of Proud Boys and other far-right groups at these events. For purposes of this chart, I looked for any of the following in the fields in the CCC data where we capture information about organizations that participated: Proud Boys, Patriot Front, White Lives Matter, National Socialist Club (including but not limited to NSC-131), Goyim Defense League, any Active Clubs, and the National Justice Party. Since June 2022, we’ve seen members of one or more of these extremist groups at roughly 24 percent of all anti-LGBTQ+ protests nationwide. For the Proud Boys specifically, the figure is about 19 percent.

Far-right groups have been active on this issue, in part, because their ideologies typically feature patriarchy and homophobia, but also because these events are useful public-relations opportunities. Once an issue like anti-LGBTQ+ activism captures the news media’s interest, fringe organizations often glom onto events involving that issue as a way to get themselves and their ideas in front of more cameras and readers. This visibility helps normalize their presence and ideas and serves as a valuable recruiting tool. The whole thing can become a bit of a vicious cycle, as extremist groups increasingly show up to try to grab the mic and the spotlight, and reporters show up because the presence of extremist groups — and possible confrontations with antifascist counter-protesters — often makes for eyeball-grabbing and click-generating content.

So, measured by event counts, the pace of right-wing anti-LGBTQ+ activism clearly hasn’t slowed in 2023. Measured by crowd size, however, the wave does show some signs of slowing. From June through December 2022, the average size of the crowd at the anti-LGBTQ+ events for which we had information about that feature was 164 people. So far in 2023, it’s been just 67 people.

What’s more, these actions are not going unchallenged. Since June 2022, nearly 43 percent of the anti-LGBTQ+ protests logged by CCC that were not themselves counters to things like pride parades or rallies over legislation have been met with direct counter-protests. That’s compared to just 5 percent of right-wing protests during the same period that did not include anti-LGBTQ+ claims. Just as the queer community and antifascists and other allies have mobilized to fight the torrent of anti-LGBTQ+ bills passing through state houses in the past few legislative cycles, they have also regularly turned up to confront this bigotry in the streets.

Each year since 2009, people around the world have gathered on March 31 (or close to it) to mark International Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV). In 2023, the U.S. saw nearly 180 TDOV events in 155 different cities and towns across 49 states, according to data collected so far by Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC). That’s up from just 15 events in 2022 and almost certainly the largest and broadest celebration of TDOV in history.

As of this writing on April 2, 2023, we only have information on crowd sizes for 45 of those 179 events. From just those 45, however, we estimate a total crowd size of nearly 8,500, give or take several hundred. The median crowd size for those 45 events was about 100, and several cities — including New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, DC — saw crowds that reportedly approached or exceeded 1,000.

TDOV ballooned in the U.S. in 2023 because of the torrent of anti-trans bills surging through state legislatures this year, and the wave of public harassment and terrorism that has accompanied it. In direct response to those trends, Queer Youth Assemble (QYA) — a youth-led organization formed in 2021 in response to rising anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and legislative action — put out a call for coordinated national marches and rallies on TDOV with a focus on queer and trans youth autonomy. Nearly 140 of the events CCC has recorded so for TDOV 2023, or about three-quarters of them, were either organized by, or in associaion with, QYA and its list of demands.

Not all of this year’s actions were affiliated with QYA’s call, however. In New York City, for example, Black Trans Femmes in the Arts (BTFA) hosted several celebratory perfomances across multiple boroughs. In Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, UDTJ hosted a flag-raising ceremony for TDOV at the Township Building, as they have done in years past. And in Eugene, Oregon, antifascists organized a vigil and rally under the title Trans Day of Vengeance — the same title used by another group of organizers in the DC metro area who chose to cancel their April 1 event after it became the target of a right-wing media blast that led to a torrent of violent threats.

This year’s historic mobilization for TDOV is part of a broader and still-swelling wave of activism for LGBTQIA+ rights in response to the salvos of reactionary state legislation and right-wing protest and terrorism mentioned above. As noted in a previous blog post and updated in the chart below, this wave really picked up steam in early 2022 after the passage of Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law, but it has kept rolling across the ensuing months. The broad turnout for this year’s TDOV helped produce the highest monthly count of pro-LGBTQ+ actions ever recorded by CCC, which has been tracking U.S. protest activity since January 2017.

In addition to tracking information about things like an event’s date and location and crowd size, CCC tries provide a more complete and nuanced picture of what each event was “about” by recording verbatim claims from participants’ signs and banners and chants as seen in photos or video or reported by journalists in their write-ups. By far the most common claim at the 2023 events from which we’ve seen participant claims so far was “Trans rights are human rights” (26 events), followed closely by “Protect trans kids” (13) and “Protect trans youth” (11), then “Trans lives matter” (5), “Black trans lives matter” (5), “Protect trans lives” (5), “Respect existence or expect resistance” (4), and “Trans liberation now” (3). In total, we have recorded more than 320 unique claims from these events so far, and we expect that count to grow as we see new articles, videos, or social media posts about this year’s actions. Some of my personal favorites from the long tail of claims we’ve seen once or twice so far include “The trans agenda is an average life expectancy”, “Fuck your gender roles”, “Girls will be boys”, “Keep your bills and bans off queer trans bodies”, “More glitter less bitter”, “No more dead trans women”, “Our joy is radical”, “The future is fluid”, “This body is my creation”, and “Stop trans genocide”.

Flags often serve as an important vehicle for political symbolism and expression at protest events, so we record information about those, too. Unsurprisingly, the Trans Pride flag was by far the most common one at this year’s TDOV actions, seen at 38 events so far, followed by the Progress Pride flag (27), Rainbow Pride flag (16), and Nonbinary Pride flag (12). We’ve also recorded one or a few instances of the Bisexual Pride flag (4), Pansexual Pride flag (4), Asexual Pride flag (2), Lesbian Pride flag (2), Straight Ally flag (2), Aromantic Pride flag (1), Genderqueer Pride flag (1), and Intersex Pride flag (1). A few events also saw participants waving American flags, alone or, in one instance, blended with the Rainbow Pride flag. And, finally, we saw one instance each of a blended Rainbow Pride/Gadsden flag, the national flag of Cuba, and a Trans Pride flag with a picture of an alligator above the slogan “Fuck around and find out.” (We use the University of Northern Colorado Gender and Sexuality Resource Center’s guide to pride flags for this task.)

For the past three legislative cycles, state lawmakers have tabled record numbers of bills that harmfully target LGBTQ+ people or seek to enforce chauvinistic ideas about sexuality and gender norms. Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) data show how that torrent of legislative hate and harm has helped to spur a counter-mobilization that includes — but isn’t limited to — a substantial and ongoing wave of protests and other demonstrations against those bills.

The column chart below shows monthly counts of pro-LGBTQ+ demonstrations in the U.S. from January 1, 2021, through March 14, 2023. In the columns, the red parts indicate what share of each month’s events included any demands or claims by participants about legislation.

As the chart shows, pro-LGBTQ+ demonstrations surged in March 2022, when students across Florida staged scores of walkouts in response to the passage of that state’s so-called Don’t Say Gay bill, which sharply limits classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity. The rate of pro-LGBTQ+ demonstrations nationwide has remained high ever since, however, averaging more than 160 per month over the following year. In just the first two weeks of March 2023 — a busy month in many state legislative calendars — CCC has already logged more than 100 pro-LGBTQ+ demonstrations, and more than half of them have explicitly referenced state legislation.

Notably, a sizeable share of these demonstrations are occurring in states that don’t typically factor in national conversations about the LGBTQ+ community or left-wing activism, because that’s where many of these bills are advancing or even passing into law. The chart below shows counts of pro-LGBTQ+ demonstrations referencing legislation (the red parts of the columns in the previous chart) by state over that same period. Florida — the third-largest state by population and, according to Governor DeSantis, “where woke goes to die” — leads by far with nearly 150 events, and first– and second-largest states California and Texas also rank in the top five. More telling, though, is the appearance near the top of that list of much smaller “red” states like Iowa, South Dakota, Kentucky, Arkansas, Utah, Montana, and Oklahoma, to name a few.

Iowa’s extraordinary position as second on that list is due in no small part to a coordinated set of student walkouts on Wednesday, March 1, 2023, that was led by Iowa WTF and the Iowa Queer Student Alliance and drew more than 1,000 students from at least 27 schools across 21 cities and towns, according to CCC data. This fight has continued to draw large crowds in opposition there, with an estimated 2,000 people gathering on the steps of the capitol in Des Moines for the Rally to Resist on Sunday, March 5, and hundreds turning out in both Davenport and Cedar Rapids this past Saturday, March 11.

These unusually large event counts and crowd sizes in smaller, more conservative states demonstrate how local LGBTQ+ organizations and communities and their allies are mobilizing and fighting back against this unprecedented wave of legislative threats to their rights, dignity, health, and even survival.

Importantly, malicious legislation is not the only threat driving this uprising. As we’ve discussed on this blog before, over the past year, the queer community has also faced a historic wave of anti-LGBTQ+ activism in the streets, with a peculiar and apparently intensifying fixation on Drag Story Hour events and other drag performances.

As shown in the chart below, this wave of reactionary protests surged around Pride Month in 2022 and again in the fall. Although it peaked in October in the run-up to Election Day, it has persisted through the winter — typically a seasonal downtime for all forms of protest — and into 2023. As we discussed in our overview of right-wing protest in 2022, while the crowds at these protests sometimes include groups engaged in quiet prayer and other less threatening activities, they have also drawn a smorgasbord of violent and openly fascist actors who look to terrorize performers and attendees, bully community-defense organizations, and draw media attention that can help them normalize their extremism and recruit new members.

Neither those threats nor the mobilization against them show any sign of abating soon, and calls from organizers lead us to expect scores if not hundreds more demonstrations in defense of the LGBTQ+ community nationwide over the next few weeks.

• On Friday, March 17, organizers in several cities, including Boston, Chicago, Denver, Madison, and Spokane, are coordinating rallies against anti-trans legislation and hate on what they’re calling Trans Day of Resistance.
• March 31 is International Transgender Day of Visibility. In addition to regular celebrations of that day across the country, a student-led group in Florida, Project Caerus, has called for school walkouts to protest anti-LGBTQ+ laws and rhetoric in their state.
• That same day, Queer Youth Assemble — which organized a wave of student walkouts spanning more than a dozen states in March 2022 — has called for demonstrations in all 50 state capitals and Washington, DC, as part of what they’re calling the March for Queer & Trans Youth Autonomy.
• On March 31 and April 1, Trans Radical Activist Network is teaming with Our Rights DC to lead a weekend of marches and protests under the title Trans Day of Vengeance with “stop trans genocide” as its slogan.

We’ll be tracking those (and thousands of other) events as they are announced and occur in our monthly Google Sheets, which are publicly visible, and in the compiled and augmented version of our full dataset on our GitHub repository. If you’re an activist, journalist, or researcher interested in using the data or statistics or visualizations derived from them, please drop me a line at julfelder@hks.harvard.edu. All of this data is freely available to the public without registration, but I’m happy to provide guidance or advice on how to use it as needed.