Celebrating Pride: Google Doodle marks 50-year anniversary with interactive video

The Doodle was created to celebrate fifty years of activism in the LGBTQ+ community

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates 50 years of Pride with an interactive video, visualising 50 years of parades.

2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, which took place in New York City in late June of 1969, and are often cited as the beginning of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

The month of June is now celebrated as Pride month, and is marked by events, learning opportunities, and calls for actions around the world.

The 1969 riots began at the Stonewall Inn, a bar on Christopher Street in Manhattan. Disputes exist in the LGBTQ+ community about how exactly the riots began, but it is agreed that they were the result of police raiding the bar for activity then considered criminal.

The traditional tale involves a brick being thrown, usually by Marsha P Johnson or Sylvia Riviera, two key activists in the gay liberation movement, who have become icons in the transgender rights movement in particular.

The two women will be honoured by the City of New York this year with a monument on Christopher Street. The city says the monument will be one of the world’s first that celebrates transgender people.

Neither appear in today’s Google Doodle, which does not portray the uprisings at all. Instead, the Doodle focuses on the celebrations that organically developed to remember the riots in the years following, as well as the harder moments, such as the AIDS crisis, which is alluded to with the triangle symbol used to signify the need to take action when the US government failed to act on the crisis in the 1980s and 1990s.

This history are visualised as expansion of the parades that often act as Pride month's centrepiece.

“The Pride Parade is a symbol of celebration and liberation for the entire LGBTQ+ community,” said Doodler Nate Swinehart in explanation of his work. He credits his coworker Cynthia Cheng with the idea to focus on the parade for his Doodle.

“From its early days of activism on Christopher Street in New York City, to the worldwide celebrations of today, it has empowered and given voice to a bright and vibrant community.”

Mr Swinehart also explained that this particular Doodle was “a very personal project for me,” writing that “as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I am very familiar with the struggle of feeling included, accepted, and that I am a ‘part’ of this world.”

“I have witnessed the strides forward for queer people over the decades, and today, many of us celebrate a level of freedom I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams while I was growing up,” he continued. “I'm hopeful for the future and a day when everyone, regardless of their identification, can stand and march proudly in celebration.”