Pride events in Czechia: between commercial and activist actions

Compared to other countries in the post-socialist bloc, pride events with parades started relatively late in the Czech Republic (as late as 2008). In the words of 1990s activists, there was no need for them because it would have unnecessarily outraged the otherwise tolerant majority society, but also because the community (meaning gays) came together for the annual "Gay Man" beauty pageants. Transactional activism was preferred over mobilizational activism (Sloboda 2021; Císař and Vráblíková 2012). The community-organised events of 2008-2010 outside the capital were then followed by the visible, commercially and spectator-successful PraguePride in 2011 and subsequent years. Despite the fact that the week-long cultural festival PraguePride is based on community-organized events with a minority of party-like events, the size of PraguePride led to the creation of the alternative (left and queer) project AltPride (Peterson et al. 2018; Pitoňák 2022). The introduction of elements of sustainability into Prague Pride (e.g. the absence of cars in the parade) led to the festival management being labelled a 'lesbian jihad'. At the same time, the dominance of PraguePride (which also implements many other activities throughout the year) in the LGBTQ+ activist scene led to the creation and implementation of six additional local Pride events in 2023, initiated by PP leadership. In my paper, I will present this chronological oscillation between community, activist and commercial conceptions of pride events in the Czech Republic in the 2000s and frame it with social movement theory (e.g., Petrova and Tarrow 2006; Paternotte 2016; O’Dwyer 2018).