On August 5th 2017 about 150 activists occupied a bridge at Amsterdam to drop four banners to protest the commercialisation of pride and the participation of racist and imperialust boats. Statement by the group:

Reclaiming Pride

The 5th of August is that time of the year again: the boat parade of Canal Pride in Amsterdam. COC but also VVD, PVDA, the Police, ING, Rabobank, Google and Uber apear in rainbow boats this year. Where Pride once began as a movement that fought for freedom, these days it has grown into a party about commerce and money. Pride involves the participation of corporations and political parties that represent arms trade, the Dakota Access Pipeline, the war over natural resources, the ethnic profiling and using racism to win votes.

We also see how LGBTQI+ rights are being used for a racist, populist, and far right smear campaign against muslims and refugees. They are said to threaten ‘our values’. But the Netherlands isn’t really that ‘tolerant’ and many white people discriminate on the basis of sexuality and gender identity. Like many other people who are fleeing poverty or war, LGBTQI+ refugees are mercilessly being deported.

We stand up against our rights being hijacked and used for racist political arguments and homonationalism. We want the Pride to be ours again, instead of a commercial party. We want our Pride to be intersectional, to connect the struggle against discrimination on the basis of sexuality and gender identity to the struggle against racism, sexism, class and other formsof exclusion. We cannot celebrate the freedom of one group at the expense of the freedom of other groups

That is why on this day we reclaim our Pride and bring it back to the fight for our liberation. This is why we gather―in all our diversity―on a big bridge, during the Canal Parade on August 5th, to show what the LGBTQI+ fight is about: radical liberation. Stop the scapegoat politics! Reclaiming the pride!

– Anti-capitalist Decolonial Intersectional Queer Solidarity Block