Celebrating Pride in the midst of a culture war

The final day of Pride Month in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was filled with heart-shaped sunglasses, rainbow-coloured hair, glitter and rage.

Hundreds had gathered outside a hotel in the city centre to protest who they consider to be unwanted visitors - Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and later on, former president Donald Trump.

The two 2024 presidential hopefuls had been invited by Moms for Liberty, a conservative group that has helped champion laws across the country that seek to restrict how gender identity and sexual orientation are taught in schools.

In the haze of Canadian wildfire smoke, a man with a Trump hat, a young daughter in tow and a baby strapped to his chest argued with protesters on the street corner.

"We're not against banning books, we're against pornography," he told an old man in a Bernie Sanders T-shirt.

A woman with fury in her face interrupted and extended an illustrated book toward the man's daughter, who was clutching his hand.

"You want to read this?", she said gruffly. "No, because your daddy won't let you? He wants you to be hateful."

But inside the hotel, the crowd was cheery and focused on Mr DeSantis, who is running for the Republican nomination for president on a platform that promises to fight "woke ideology".

"This woke agenda is not something that's just theoretical. If it controls every institution in our society, this country will fail," he said to the crowd.

This clash of viewpoints has become increasingly familiar, as Americans engage in a philosophical and political tug-of-war between supporters of gay rights and a growing conservative movement that opposes what they call "liberal indoctrination", including teaching LGBT topics in schools and gender-transition care for minors.

This year alone, over 75 bills labelled by civil rights groups as anti-LGBT were passed in the US - more than double the number in 2022. While Republicans say that many of these bills seek to protect children, members of the LGBT community say they feel demonised.

Philadelphia is historically a liberal safe haven, with a gay community that has been active since the 1930s. Giovanni's Room, in the city's "Gayborhood", is the country's oldest operating LGBT bookstore. But this Pride, employees there said they have had to be more on guard. A recent FBI report found that hate crimes based on sexual orientation had risen by 54% in 2021, compared with the year before.

"We have been getting more and more harassment," said the store's manager, Katharine Smith, 39. "It really started picking up this year."

Inside, the bookstore has an aesthetic that is a mix of library and raging disco. There are shelves and shelves of books, grey walls with pink window trim, Pride flags, a disco ball, and a nude painting.

Founded in 1973, the same year the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness, Giovanni's Room has been a bulwark for the community. Tom Wilson-Weinberg, one of the co-founders, said that despite progress on gay rights since then, the atmosphere now feels increasingly like it did when he first opened the store 50 years ago.

"It didn't occur to me that here I am in my late 70s and all this awful stuff is being thrown our way. It's very upsetting," Mr Wilson said.

When it first opened, he said, people would throw bricks through its windows and beat its patrons as they left the store at night. These days, hate most often arrives in the form of vicious words, Ms Smith said, noting a general increase in hate mail. One recent email contained a homophobic slur and read "we hate you" and accused staff of "grooming kids".

It is in this charged and fearful atmosphere that Philadelphia's LGBT community and their supporters decided to protest Moms for Liberty's summit. One petition to stop the event garnered almost 30,000 signatures nationally.

On Thursday, as charter buses began dropping off Moms for Liberty members at the Museum of the American Revolution for a welcome reception, a woman stood on the bed of an old, rusted, white truck parked nearby and screamed "Philly is a trans city" into a microphone.

The crowd roared with her. Some Moms for Liberty members with kids shielded their children's eyes and ears from the protesters' occasionally explicit outbursts.

"All we want is to have a normal damn life," Jazmyn Henderson, a 47-year-old transgender woman who was there to protest, told the BBC. "Because of the rhetoric that is out there, and the things that are going on, I don't feel safe, ever."

But the opposition did not seem to shake Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich, who appeared calm and collected as she prepared for the weekend ahead.

She said: "The narrative that we are against the LGBTQ community in any way is false."

The Southern Poverty Law Centre, a progressive civil-rights watch dog, designated them as an extremist group that uses aggressive tactics and expresses views that are "anti-government and conspiracy propagandist".

But the group's mission, according to her, is simply to promote parental rights, which she describes as a parent's right to get involved in their children's education, particularly on the policy-making level.

What began as a grass-roots campaign against mask mandates during the pandemic, with just two chapters in Florida in 2021, has now grown to become one of the key voices in the country's increasingly heated debate over how LGBT and race issues are taught in schools.

The group now boasts nearly 300 chapters in 45 states with 120,000 members, according to Ms Descovich.

"We looked across the country in 2020, and parents were frustrated," Ms Descovich said. "They were finally starting to see what their kids were learning in school."

Americans are largely divided on how to teach LGBT issues in classrooms. According to a recent poll by APM Research Lab, seven in 10 adults think it is acceptable for middle school teachers to have classroom discussions about lesbian, gay and bisexual people. But only three out of 10 think it's acceptable for teachers to assign the same age group with a book with a lesbian, gay or bisexual character.

And only 39% of Americans think teachers should definitely use a teenage student's preferred gender pronouns, according to the survey. About 38% said they should never use preferred gender pronouns.

But support varies widely according to a person's political affiliation, with 61% of Democrats believing teachers should use preferred pronouns, compared to only 18% of Republicans.

John Crossan, a city councilman in a district next to Philadelphia, and a gay Republican, agrees with a lot of the ideologies supported by Moms for Liberty and said that anything that has to do with sexuality should be a conversation for parents at home, not for schools.

He said books should be "restricted by age just like cigarettes".

"Books that may be inappropriate for certain ages are restricted for certain ages, just like porn is restricted," he argued.

On Friday night, when former president Donald Trump took to the stage as the keynote speaker, he praised Moms for Liberty, calling them "joyful warriors and fierce patriots".

"You're not the threat to America; you're the best thing that's ever happened to America," he said to loud applause.

But for Jose DeMarco, a member of the Philadelphia AIDS non-profit Act Up Philly, Mr Trump's rallying cry was a terrifying reminder of the threats they are facing - and a rallying cry to fight back.

"As a queer person of colour, I'm afraid. I'm really afraid," Mr DeMarco said. "I'm afraid of people actually losing their civil rights. We just saw this happen with abortion."

"They're trying to make it harder for people to have the right to live their lives as they are," he said.

Mr DeMarco, 50, said the LGBT community is used to facing opposition in the march toward equality, and it will not back down.

"I believe what's happening and what's going on now, I think it's going to galvanize the queer community to fight back," he said.

"I think this time it's really going to pull us altogether."