At the start of the 2023 Drag March in Tompkins Square Park

Photos by Stacie Joy 

The 29th edition of the Drag March took place last night — a kick-off to NYC Pride Weekend. 

Once again, a fabulous group of generation-spanning participants gathered in Tompkins Square Park for the march across Ninth Street to Sheridan Square and the Stonewall Inn. 

As East Village-based writer Jeremiah Moss wrote on Instagram: "The Drag March remains wonderfully sweaty, scrappy, queer, vaguely '90s, and still very East Village."

At the Drag March along 9th Street

Images by Stacie Joy 

The 28th edition of the Drag March took place last night — a kick-off to NYC Pride Weekend. 

As always, participants gathered in Tompkins Square Park ... before the group — estimated in the thousands — marched across Ninth Street to Sheridan Square and the Stonewall Inn. 

EVG contributor Stacie Joy met the annual drag protest and visibility march along Ninth Street ...

At the start of the Drag March in Tompkins Square Park

Photos by Steven 

Drag March participants gathered in Tompkins Square Park early last evening to prepare for the nearly hour-long walk — with blocks-long numbers of queens and kings — to Sheridan Square and then the Stonewall Inn. 

The 28th annual Drag March included signs of protest against the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade ... with everyone decked out in their Drag March best...

The Drag March is TONIGHT

The 28th annual Drag March is tonight ... starting in Tompkins Square Park, where hundreds of participants will being gathering at 7 before making their way over (at 8-ish) to Sheridan Square and then the Stonewall Inn. 

The Drag March got its start during the Stonewall 25th anniversary celebrations in 1994. 

You can check out Stacie Joy's photo from last June right here.

At the 27th annual Drag March

Photos by Stacie Joy

A larger and more festive Drag March took place this past Friday evening... as participants gathered in Tompkins Square Park before making the nearly hour-long walk to Sheridan Square and then the Stonewall Inn.

Last year's edition was a much smaller, and more organic gathering during the throes of the pandemic.

The 27th annual Drag March was an aptly joyous start to Pride Weekend...

... and as the march got underway along Ninth Street ...

The Drag March got its start during the Stonewall 25th anniversary celebrations in 1994.

Here's a HuffPost piece from 2018 with more history:

Brian Griffin, aka Harmonie Moore Must Die, was a member of the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP and Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM) in the mid-1990s, an activist who saw the power of drag to confront intolerance and practice civil disobedience in a way that also celebrated queerness. But at planning meetings for the Stonewall 25th anniversary celebrations, Griffin told HuffPost, the committee made it clear that it was only interested in presenting a somewhat sanitized version of LGBTQ activism.

"The committee for Stonewall 25 had actually asked — and it still seems quite unbelievable — that they didn't want anyone to show up in leather or drag. It still, 25 years later, blows my mind," Griffin said. "They wanted to normalize the image of gay America for a mass audience. They wanted to present a palatable image of gay men and women, men and women who were normal."