Tributes to Orlando victims kick off Pride Parade
On Saturday afternoon, Jason Mendes-McAllister danced at the public funeral for longtime friend Edward "Eddie" Sotomayor, Jr. in Sarasota, Florida.
On Sunday, Mendes-McAllister was front and center honoring Sotomayor's life in a moving tribute to open Chicago's 47th annual Pride Parade.
Sotomayor, 34, known to his friends and fans as "Top Hat Eddie," was one of 49 people killed June 12 in a terror attack at Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
Wearing a top hat with the initials "ES" on the front, Mendes-McAllister was one of many marchers who kicked off Sunday's parade carrying signs featuring the names and photos of each victim of the most deadly mass shooting in U.S. history.
"His loss hit me hard. This is an extremely emotional event for me to honor him in this way," Mendes-McAllister said. "Eddie had such a captivating smile and absolute love in his heart for anyone he ever met."
Many of the parade's participants said they had expected the event to be a celebration of the anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision legalizing same-sex marriage, handed down June 26, 2015.
But some felt the tone was muted instead by the Orlando tragedy. Many floats featured celebratory themes but almost all made reference to the hashtag "#WeAreOrlando or #StandWithOrlando.
"We were supposed to be celebrating the one-year anniversary of our sons and daughters (being) able to marry," said Toni Weaver, president of PFLAG's (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) Northern Illinois Council in Elmhurst. "We'll still do that, but today we're also standing in solidarity with the parents whose children were killed in Orlando, especially the Latino community, where so many parents learned that their children were part of the community when they learned they were killed inside a gay nightclub."
Julio Rodriguez, president of Association of Latinos Motivated to Action, last participated in a large-scale memorial in 1986.
"That was for people who died of AIDS and this brings back so many terrible memories," Rodriguez said as he prepared to participate in the opening memorial. "But rather than dampening the spirit of today, we need to take pride back to where it started 47 years ago where we said we weren't going to let things stay the way they were. There's still work to be done."
Not everyone adopted a somber tone. Monica Trejo of Bloomingdale and friend Shelly Bailey of Bartlett were clad in rainbow from head to toe and kept pace with just about every song playing on passing floats.
"We're here to support some friends in the LGBTQ community who have really been distraught by everything in Orlando," Trejo said. "But this is really a day where they can let loose in a comfortable environment and just dance the stress away."
An estimated crowd of 850,000 lined the parade's four-mile route, which ran from the city's Uptown neighborhood to Diversey Parkway and Sheridan Road in Lincoln Park.
They were joined by a stepped-up security presence, which included an additional 200 uniformed and plainclothes Chicago Police officers, as well as 160 off-duty officers hired by parade organizers.