![]() ![]() But when the nightspot unexpectedly closed two weeks later, West was left adrift. Louis, had just moved to the city with the lure of working at the County Seat gay bar. But the hours-long, televised, corporate-sponsored, rainbow-hued spectacle that steps off on Peachtree Street in 2022 is eons away from the city’s first Pride marches-protests held in the aftermath of New York’s Stonewall riots in 1969, which became the accelerant for the modern gay rights movement. Just a few years later, West would be poised atop a float in the parade waving to admirers as his now-iconic Atlanta drag persona Lena Lust.Īlong with countless other LGBTQ locals, West is eagerly anticipating the return of this year’s Atlanta Pride Parade, scheduled for October 9, after being canceled for two years, due to Covid-19. People who couldn’t be themselves in their small towns moved here and were accepted for themselves.” “Community was the reason I moved here, because Atlanta was considered the gay mecca of the south in the ’70s. “I was a senior in high school when the Stonewall riots happened, so to see all those people lined up on Peachtree Street-the main street in Atlanta-cheering for folks in the parade felt thrilling,” West, now 71, recalls.
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