The St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue is the most significant expression of Irish culture and celebration in New York City. But for 25 years, beginning in 1991, the fight for LGBTQ participation was met with “high levels of madness.” This intergenerational talk will feature historian Emma Quinn and activist Brendan Fay, who will discuss this decades-long campaign and the importance of Irish LGBTQ visibility in St. Patrick’s Day celebrations around the city. Amanda Davis from the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project will moderate and there will be time for Q&A from the audience.

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About the Speakers

THE HISTORIAN: Emma Quinn is Assistant Professor and Learning and Curricular Services Librarian at St. John’s University. She has an MA in Irish and Irish-American Studies from NYU and an MLIS from Long Island University. Her research interests lie in the history of gender and sexuality in the Irish Catholic diaspora, with a focus on New York, as well as inclusive and accessible pedagogy.

THE ACTIVIST: Brendan Fay is an immigrant from Ireland and long-time resident of Astoria, Queens, where he lives with his husband, Tom Moulton. He is a human rights activist and filmmaker whose employment as a Catholic high school teacher in Queens was terminated in 1991 for marching with the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO) at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue. For 25 years, the Irish LGBTQ group he founded, Lavender and Green Alliance – Muintir Aerach na hÉireann, fought alongside others for the right to march openly in the parade, a fight that ended successfully in 2016. During that time, Fay also founded the inclusive St. Pat’s for All Parade, in Queens, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2025.

This free virtual program is part of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project’s “The Historian & The Activist: Cross-Cultural LGBTQ New York” series, made possible by a grant from Humanities New York with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is the first in a three-part series; subsequent programs will address contemporary cross-cultural LGBT identities within Puerto Rican and Jewish communities, and their connections to historic sites in NYC from the 1950s to 2000.

from AMNewYork

Black-and-white imagery can often capture the raw emotions of people as vividly as color, helping to sear into the public consciousness the importance of events — particularly the movement for equal rights.

The Dyke March, which first took place in the 1990s, is among the many events this Pride weekend not only celebrating LGBTQ+ rights, but also continuing the march toward greater equality for all Americans regardless of their sexual orientation. This year’s march took place on Saturday, June 19, and I yearned to show the connection between this year’s event and equal rights marches of the past by viewing it through a lens that’s nearly 50 years old.

With a Polaroid SX70 in hand, I followed thousands of protesters striding, and sometimes dancing, down Fifth Avenue. Delicately turning the focus wheel to bring demonstrators blocking traffic into sight and snapping an image that could have been taken decades prior exhibited the heritage the protest is continuing to champion.

The Dyke March is a celebration of lesbian and trans rights, and its centerpiece is the proliferation of activism — comparatively to the 1969 Stonewall Riots that led to the creation of the Pride March.

Beginning in the early 1990s, the Dyke March looked to thrust women into the spotlight in what was, at the time, a more male-dominated scene and was held with civil disobedience in mind, according to NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.

Read the article, with photos, at AMNewYork.