It’s rather absurd that it’s been partly hijacked by anti-government protests (just as gay rights activists have part-hijacked anti-government protests), since although a number of previous governments have backed gay rights and discussed gay marriage / partnership, this is the first government to actually do anything about it with a Civil Partnership Bill that was approved by the Cabinet in July as the first step to full Civil Partnership rights, equal to marriage.
On Novemthe first Taiwan Pride was held in Taipei with over 1,000 people attending. Recently in 2019, the 17th Taiwan LGBT parade is the first gay parade after Taiwan ’s same-sex marriage legislation, with attendances of over 200,000, which the largest such event in East Asia. Pride parades have always been about taking “pride” in being gay, while for most gay Thais is nothing to be proud or ashamed of but it’s simply nothing more than the way they are and were born. Taipei hosts an annual Gay Pride Parade in October. In Pattaya and Phuket the parades have virtually died out, attracting only a few hundred participants in a good year primarily as advertisements for the gay bars – they weren’t helped by being held as part of International Aids Day, with the inevitable implication that Aids was a gay issue which was exactly the opposite to the message many gays were trying to get across. The minimal number of participants (2,000) shows just how little support there is for any sort of “Gay Pride” in Thailand, compared with over 30,000 in London and Sydney, where there are usually half a million “supporters” watching the parade.