Crowds flock to Hong Kong’s Pink Dot to celebrate the first outdoor LGBTQ carnival since 2018, despite overlapping district council election

Thousands of people dressed in pink on Sunday flocked to Hong Kong’s largest LGBTQ carnival, held outdoors for the first time since 2018, with organisers saying the controversial Gay Games recently hosted by the city have drummed up support for the community.

All public speeches at the Pink Dot HK 2023 carnival, however, were cancelled after a request by police to end the event at the West Kowloon Cultural District an hour earlier at 8pm due to crowd control concerns over a nearby fireworks show.

“We cannot cut the entertainer programmes as they had already rehearsed,” carnival co-organiser Brian Leung Siu-fai said. “So we decided to cut all the sharing speeches by the involved organisations.”

Leung said he acknowledged that police resources were being spread thin with the district council election that coincided with the fireworks event, which posed challenges for the force in case any conflicts arose during the annual carnival.

A police source said earlier that up to 12,000 officers would be deployed across the city to boost security during the revamped poll on Sunday.

“Police put forward several requests during the meetings on Thursday and Friday,” he said. “As the organisers, we do our best to accommodate them.”

He also noted that the force checked the venue in the afternoon and found that the organisers had strictly limited attendees to no more than 3,500.