After years of controversy and boycotts, the parade’s organizers said it was time to change the exclusionary policy.
The original St. Patrick’s Day parade on Staten Island will welcome L.G.B.T.Q. groups for the first time in its 60-year history, ending a standoff between the borough’s gay community and the committee that organizes the parade.
Organizers invited the Pride Center of Staten Island, a nonprofit community group, to march in the celebration on March 2, 2025. The invitation followed a change in leadership within the committee that runs the parade, according to SILive.com, which first reported the change.
At a news conference on Tuesday, the group’s new leader, Edward Patterson, said mounting pressure to make the parade more inclusive had persuaded the group to change its policy.
“Quite simply, it’s just time,” Mr. Patterson said. “People stepped up with a change in mind-set that, frankly, wanted the controversy to go away.”
The Pride Center’s inclusion is a hard-won victory for L.G.B.T.Q. activists on Staten Island and beyond who had protested the parade’s policy for decades. The New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade, a much larger event held in Manhattan, lifted a two-decade ban on L.G.B.T.Q. groups in 2014.
Though the Pride Center is the only group so far to receive an invitation to the Staten Island event, organizers suggested Tuesday that they would be open to welcoming more L.G.B.T.Q. delegations.
