The St. Pat's for All Parade is an annual Saint Patrick's Day parade held in Sunnyside and Woodside in Queens, New York City, United States. Processing along Skillman Avenue, it honors Irish culture while explicitly welcoming LGBTQ participants and contingents from other immigrant and ethnic communities. It was first held on March 5, 2000, and was initiated by Brendan Fay, a gay Irish immigrant, in response to the exclusion of LGBTQ groups such as the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization from the New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade in Manhattan. The parade's motto, "Cherishing All the Children of the Nation Equally," is taken from the Proclamation of the Irish Republic issued during the Easter Rising of 1916.
The parade has been held annually in early March since its founding, with the 2021 parade held virtually rather than in person because of the COVID-19 pandemic; the 27th annual parade took place on March 1, 2026. By its second decade the once-"insurgent" protest event had grown in size and gained mainstream acceptance, drawing diverse ethnic contingents, pipe bands, and politicians. In 2016 Fay and co-chair Kathleen Walsh D'Arcy received the Presidential Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad from Irish President Michael D. Higgins for their work with the parade and the Lavender and Green Alliance.
Background
The New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade in Manhattan, organized since 1851 by the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), became the focus of a long-running civil-rights dispute beginning in 1990, when the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO) sought permission to march under its own banner. AOH denied the request; under pressure from Mayor David Dinkins, a compromise allowed ILGO to march in 1991 alongside an AOH chapter without a banner, but spectators heckled the group and threw beer cans, after which AOH formally banned ILGO from future parades.
Through the 1990s, courts upheld AOH's right to exclude LGBTQ contingents, most consequentially in the 1995 unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, which affirmed that parade organizers held a First Amendment right to exclude marchers as a form of expressive speech. In subsequent years, the AOH publicly framed the Manhattan parade as a more strictly Catholic ritual than in earlier decades; one AOH division president told an interviewer, "The New York parade has a lot of decorum. That whole thing with the homosexuals? You know we're not going to take any nonsense whatsoever. It's not a political thing, it's a religious thing." Dinkins boycotted the Manhattan parade in 1992 and 1993, breaking a tradition of mayoral attendance dating to 1923, and the exclusion led to recurring civil-disobedience protests, including arrests of LGBTQ marchers and elected officials over the following decades. In 1994, Fay broke from ILGO and founded the Lavender and Green Alliance as a forum for Irish-American LGBTQ cultural expression (Gaelic language, music, and dance) as well as parade-inclusion advocacy.
The Manhattan parade gradually opened to LGBTQ marchers under sustained pressure that included de Blasio's mayoral boycott and a 2014 sponsorship withdrawal by Guinness. In September 2014, organizers announced that OUT@NBCUniversal would become the first LGBT group permitted to march under its own banner in the 2015 parade. One year later, the parade committee voted to admit Lavender and Green for the 2016 parade, which Fay called crossing "a historic threshold." On March 17, 2016, Lavender and Green marched up Fifth Avenue for the first time, ending the formal ban; de Blasio returned to the Manhattan parade after his two-year boycott, and Fay told reporters, "This is unbelievable." Fay and members of the alliance continued to march in the Manhattan parade in subsequent years, including in 2019.
History
Founding (2000)
In 2000, Fay founded St. Pat's for All as an inclusive alternative to the Manhattan St. Patrick's Day Parade. Alongside Ellen Duncan, he served as a co-chair of the inaugural event, held on Sunday, March 5; co-organizers included Daniel Dromm, the founder of the Queens Pride Parade. The parade adopted as its motto the phrase "Cherishing All the Children of the Nation Equally," from the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Organizers framed the event as both an Irish-heritage parade and an inclusive civic celebration, open to LGBTQ marchers and to participants of all ethnicities and cultures.
During the inaugural parade, Chief Dark Cloud of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma performed a blessing acknowledging Native-Irish ties and the Choctaw aid sent during the Great Famine. The parade has also observed a moment of silence for Robert Rygor, an early advocate for LGBTQ inclusion in the Manhattan parade who died of AIDS-related causes in 1994. Newsday reported that more than 70 social, community, and educational organizations marched, four of them gay and lesbian groups, and that thousands lined the 20-block route along Skillman Avenue. Contingents included Korean marchers honoring the Irish nuns who had taught them, Chilean folk musicians honoring Bernardo O'Higgins, the Irish-descended founder of Chile; the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, Lavender and Green Alliance, SAGE, Queens Lesbian and Gay Pride Committee, Dignity/New York, and PFLAG's Queens chapter; the Irish Arts Center and the Emerald Isle Immigration Center; the Sunnyside Drum Corps; and Father Mychal F. Judge of St. Francis of Assisi Church in Manhattan. Then-First Lady and U.S. Senate candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, in her first street appearance in Queens as an official candidate, marched seven blocks of the route and pushed the wheelchair of 16-year-old disability-rights advocate Anastasia Somoza, later a 2017 grand marshal, up Skillman Avenue. Council Member Dromm, a co-organizer, said Clinton's attendance "brought a lot of legitimacy to this parade."
Local reception of the inaugural parade was mixed. The Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce and a Woodside block association publicly disassociated themselves from the event, and a Catholic church along the route refused to let participating children use its restrooms. Two organized opposition groups, "Concerned Friends of Woodside" and the "Morality Action Committee," distributed fliers before the parade describing the event as evil and as an "insult to God and Catholics," though only a small number of protestors materialized along the route. Counter-protesters held religious-themed signs reading "Sacrilege," "Sacrilegious," "Blasphemy," and "Sodomites"; a Yonkers accountant briefly attempted to block the route by kneeling in prayer before being moved aside by police, and a Sunnyside resident heckled Clinton with shouts of "Go back to Arkansas, carpetbagger!" Newsday columnist Dennis Duggan described the event as "the first Irish parade in New York to include gays and lesbians marching under their own banner."
Fay served as the parade's principal organizer for 22 years, working alongside longtime co-leader Kathleen Walsh D'Arcy, and stepped down in November 2021. The parade has subsequently been organized by Walsh D'Arcy and other co-chairs. In December 2016, Fay and Walsh D'Arcy were among the recipients of the Presidential Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad, presented by Irish President Michael D. Higgins at Áras an Uachtaráin in recognition of their work with the Lavender and Green Alliance and St. Pat's for All.
Growth and reception (2001–2019)
Coverage of the second annual parade, which proceeded on March 4, 2001, detailed continuing opposition. Organizers received an answering-machine threat consisting of the sound of a gun firing, and posters were hung only days before the event for fear of being torn down. After a branch of Catholic Charities in Woodside withdrew an earlier offer to host marchers, no Queens Catholic parish or school agreed to participate, and organizers were unable to recruit a Catholic priest to give the opening blessing. Two Republican Party leaders in Woodside, Patrick Hurley and Ed Coyne, publicly condemned the parade as an "extremist gay and lesbian exhibition hopelessly and ignobly disguised as a celebration of Irish culture." Organizers framed the event as "a diverse parade, not a gay parade." The event drew Public Advocate Mark Green and Comptroller Alan Hevesi, both Democratic candidates in the 2001 mayoral race; Mayor Rudolph Giuliani continued his tradition of marching only in the Staten Island parade. The 2002 parade was dedicated to the memory of Father Mychal Judge, the FDNY chaplain who was the first identified casualty of the September 11 attacks and who had marched in the inaugural 2000 parade in his Franciscan habit; Fay later said of Judge, "When few clergy were willing to walk with us or stand with us, he walked with us in his Franciscan habit."
By 2005 the parade was drawing several hundred marchers and continuing to attract elected officials including Council Member Eric Gioia, Assemblyman Michael Gianaris, and New Paltz mayor Jason West, a national figure for officiating same-sex marriages outside legal authorization in early 2004. By Mulligan's 2007 account, the parade had doubled in size compared to the previous year. Bloomberg and Quinn both marched in the 14th annual parade in 2013, with IrishCentral describing the event as "one of the most diverse in the city, embracing LGBT contingents, community groups, children's bands, Irish organizations and religious and civic groups." By 2013, when The New York Times covered the parade's expected 2,000-plus marchers and the addition of the FDNY Emerald Society Pipes and Drums (a band Fay had previously been unable to recruit), Fay told the paper, "We're now part of the St. Patrick's Day tradition in New York."
The 2018 parade, marking the event's 19th year, was framed by organizers around several commemorative themes: the centenary of women's suffrage in Ireland, the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, and the 50th anniversary of the Catonsville Nine Vietnam War draft protest, alongside support for DACA recipients then under threat in U.S. immigration policy.
Pandemic and post-pandemic (2020–2023) The 2021 parade was held virtually for the first time in its history due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with messages of support from Council Member Daniel Dromm, Irish Consul-General Ciaran Madden, and U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; the program was dedicated to the late activist Tarlach MacNiallais and featured musical performances by Mick Moloney, David Amram, and Malachy McCourt, along with a filmed message from young people in Drogheda inspired by the poetry of Seamus Heaney. The 2022 parade, held on March 6 and honoring MacNiallais, marked the return of in-person marching after the pandemic; Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, and U.S. Representative Carolyn Maloney marched.
25th anniversary and political turn (2024–present)
The 25th annual parade, on March 3, 2024, drew a large gathering of state and city elected officials, including U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Attorney General Letitia James, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, Irish Consul-General Helena Nolan, and Irish Senator Jerry Buttimer, and was the occasion of the "St. Pat's for All Way" street co-naming at Skillman Avenue and 43rd Street. The 2025 parade, the 26th, fielded a record number of more than 110 marching contingents. The 2026 parade, on March 1, brought roughly 1,000 marchers across more than 100 contingents and was attended by Attorney General James, Borough Presidents Richards and Antonio Reynoso of Brooklyn, State Senator Michael Gianaris, and Council Members Julie Won, Shekar Krishnan, and Linda Lee; it was dedicated as a tribute to writer-actor Malachy McCourt (1931–2024), a longtime parade supporter and 2006 co-grand marshal.
Parade route