Blowing Water | Progress has been made on LGBT equality but Hong Kong’s government needs to do more to show support for the LGBT community
- Unlike in other cities around the world, our leaders have been slow to match their pro-equality words with actions
- Carrie Lam and other top officials have repeatedly turned down invitations to attend the Hong Kong Pride Parade
I walked on rainbows the other day in the Marais, a historic neighbourhood in Paris that in recent decades has become a world-renowned centre of LGBT culture. Everywhere I went, I felt the pride of this city that unreservedly celebrates diversity, universal values, and rejects discrimination.
The Marais wholeheartedly values and embraces diversity and inclusion policies for the LGBT community, to the extent that the mayor of Paris recently made bright rainbow crossings a permanent feature as a way of striking back at homophobic vandalism.
The rainbow pedestrian crossings were initially just temporary installations to celebrate Paris’ annual Gay Pride, held every June. But some of them were defaced with the words “LGBT get out of France”.
As a result, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo announced that these colourful public artworks, commissioned by La Marche des Fiertés – as Gay Pride is officially known in France – would stay indefinitely. She even vowed to install extra decorations to celebrate gay pride.
I say good on her, because Hidalgo is showing the world that she is not simply confronting bigots and homophobic graffiti or merely supporting LGBT rights, she is in fact fighting a bigger battle to preserve the values of humanity.