San Antonio’s LGBTQ+ community is celebrating 50 years of Pride in the Alamo City.
To commemorate the kick-off of Pride month and this half-century milestone, San Antonio City Hall raised a rainbow flag Monday morning for the fifth year in a row.
Though Pride month commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City, the celebration took a few years to come to San Antonio. At the time, many of Alamo City LGBTQ+ residents opted instead to celebrate Pride among Houston’s vibrant community.
Fifty years ago, LGBTQ+ SaN Antonians marched on the Alamo chanting “two, four, six, eight — gay is just as good as straight!” The San Antonio Express-News reported on the historic occasion, noting that a crowd of fewer than 50 “cheering gays” comprised the modest march, which was met with “cold stares” and “laughter” from some onlookers.
But Pride in San Antonio has only gotten bigger, louder and gayer since then.
“For five decades, our community has continued to stand strong and speak out and show up in courage, love, and pride,” Michael Rendon, chair of San Antonio’s LGBTQIA Advisory Commission, said at Monday’s flag-raising ceremony on the steps of City Hall. “San Antonio has shown that visibility matters and raises the Pride flag that sends a message to every LGBTQ person: you are welcome here, you are loved here, and you are valued here.”
Rendon was joined at the ceremony by other members of San Antonio’s LGBTQ+ community, including District 2 Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez and Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, the city’s first openly gay mayor.
Jones spoke of the importance of flying the flag over city hall as a reminder of the progress achieved since that first Pride celebration — and of the work still needed to be done.
“I think it’s also a powerful reminder and affirmation over the course of their life, all the progress they have seen,” Mayor Jones said at the ceremony. “Some of that, unfortunately, being wiped away, but all the more necessary to remind young people, in particular, of how far we’ve come, how much progress we have lost, unfortunately, just within these short last couple of years, and the importance of continuing to resist.”
In the past year, Gov. Greg Abbott waged a culture war on the rainbow crosswalks installed by San Antonio and other Texas cities, mandating that they remove the decoration or risk losing TxDOT funding. Despite city efforts to obtain an exemption, San Antonio’s Pride Crosswalks were removed in February.
However, less than a month later, city officials found a workaround as a form of what McKee-Rodriguez referred to Monday as “a bit of malicious compliance.”
In lieu of rainbows on the roads — which are under state purview — rainbow sidewalks now adorn two blocks of Main Avenue in San Antonio’s Pride Cultural Heritage District. Those sidewalks belong to the city.
“We might’ve had to do what the state wants on their property,” Councilmember Sukh Kaur, whose District 1 includes the Pride district, told KSAT at the time. “But we’re doing what we want on our property.”
As another milestone in Pride’s 50th year in San Antonio, the traditional rainbow flag is now joined by the Progress Pride Flag, an updated, more inclusive representation of the LGBTQ+ community that acknowledges trans, nonbinary and Black and Brown members. The 2018 variant is being flown in front of city hall.
The traditional rainbow flag, with a star and the Alamo in the center to celebrate the city and state, adorns a flag pole on top of City Hall, beneath the American flag and above a Spurs flag, as if sorting the city’s June 2026 priorities.
San Antonio’s Pride Parade will be held Saturday, June 27.
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