A group of men say they were assaulted and harassed during Pride celebrations in Amsterdam over a week ago while waiting to enter Club Church for the Gay Pride (Z)onderbroek party.
One of the men Loki, a 37-year-old international civil rights attorney, accused the owner of the next door restaurant De Sneeker Pan, of “harassing and yelling” at him and a few other patrons to get off the sidewalk as they waited for Club Church to open its doors.
Hundreds of thousands of people packed the Nieuwe Herengracht, Amstel, and Prinsengracht for the Amsterdam Pride parade on Saturday. The 24th edition of the parade, held annually since 1996, featured 80 boats and was expected to draw between half a million and a million people.
The parade went off with no major incidents reported. Including support vessels, 147 boats took part in the event. When lined up end-to-end they stretched for nearly 2,240 meters, according to the fire department.
Football analyst Johan Derksen is again under fire about statements he made, this time for comments made about gay people on Veronica Inside. "We just have to stop saying its so hard to come out of the closet. If you have a bit of character, you just come out", he said. The remark has since turned into the viral hashtag #SorryJohan with over 17 thousand posts on Twitter, RTL Nieuws reports.
Two kissing women were assaulted on an Amsterdam street early on Tuesday morning. One of the victims is documentary maker Denise Kelm Soares, who is in the city for the documentary festival IDFA. She believes they were attacked because of their sexuality, Trouw reports.
A group of women went to the city center for a night out on Monday night and left a club early on Tuesday morning. The two women were attacked as they walked through the city around 4:00 a.m.
The VVD, CDA, D66 and ChristenUnie are now really very almost done with their government agreement, ChristenUnie leader Gert-Jan Segers said to NOS on Friday afternoon. But he thinks the four parties will have to meet again on Monday.
There will be no meetings over the weekend. The ChristenUnie respects the Sunday rest. "And on Saturday I have other plans", Segers said to the broadcaster.
The new Dutch government plans to limit gender registration and work gender-neutrally as much as possible, sources confirmed to RTL Nieuws. Article 1 of the Dutch Constitution will be supplemented to specifically prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The city of Amsterdam renamed the Westerkerk tram stop to the Homo-Monument stop for Tuesday, the 30th birthday of the monument on Westermarkt. On September 5th, 1987 the Homo-Monument was unveiled. According to the municipality, it was the first gay monument in public space in the world, NU.nl reports.
On Tuesday evening the documentary Monument van Trots by Sebastiaan Kes will premiere at the monument. The accompanying exhibition and the film will tour through the Netherlands after Tuesday.
A massive 100 thousand people turned out to watch the Canal Pride parade in Amsterdam on Saturday, the traditional highlight of the nine-day long Amsterdam Pride festival. The police arrested a total of 30 people, 13 for crimes the rest for less serious offenses like public drunkenness, the police said in a statement on Sunday.
The Amsterdam Rainbow Dress, designed to draw attention to the persecution of LGBTQ community members globally, was presented in San Francisco this week by an Amsterdam delegation to honor California's Harvey Milk Day. The dress features 75 national flags of countries where homosexuality is included in the national Criminal Code.
