Albuquerque Pride: Slow Progress in the High Desert

New Mexico decriminalized same-sex activity in nineteen seventy-five, ahead of most states. The following summer, Albuquerque held its first Pride march, seven years after the Stonewall uprising in New York, in a state where what the marchers were celebrating had been legally protected for twelve months. It was a small procession in a city of roughly three hundred thousand people, and it was not greeted with universal enthusiasm.

The Albuquerque LGBTQ community through the late nineteen seventies and eighties built its social infrastructure around a network of bars concentrated in the central part of the city. By the late eighties and early nineties, the HIV and AIDS crisis had arrived here as it had everywhere, and with it the organizing urgency that drove advocacy across the country. The community that built bars built support networks, health clinics, and legal advocacy organizations.

The New Mexico Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling on December nineteenth, two thousand thirteen, making same-sex marriage legal statewide. New Mexico was the seventeenth state to reach marriage equality and did so by court ruling rather than legislation, meaning the victory was immediate rather than pending an election. It arrived about a year and a half before the United States Supreme Court's federal ruling in Obergefell.

Dr. PJ Sedillo documented four decades of Pride in Albuquerque in a book published in two thousand sixteen: Solidarity Through Pride, covering the period from nineteen seventy-six to two thousand sixteen. The community that began with a small march is now embedded in the city's civic fabric. The bars that survived the AIDS crisis and the pandemic years are still there. The Pride celebration, held annually in June, draws tens of thousands of participants.