Seoul Queer Culture Festival

The first banner I saw on my way in.

The hardcore Christians were set up along the left side of this road.

Here's a route map for the parade.

One elderly woman took off her shoes to protest near the festival, I'm guessing so it would be more dangerous for the cops to drag her away.

Meanwhile at the same time, they were setting up an "outdoor library" in Seoul Plaza. I have to admit it was a better ruse than the Christian TV station's "youth" festival last year. As one friend remarked, "Needs more queer literature."

Meanwhile the Itaewon disaster memorial was still a few meters away, though it would move a couple weeks later.

It turns out it was empty because it wasn't supposed to start until sometime like 4. Still a waste of the space during the afternoon.

I convinced a cop to let me go out on the roof of the library.

There's part of the Christian protest.

A panorama.

And the rest of the protest.

They seemed to be in sections.

I scouted out the parade route. There were these people in front of Myeongdong Cathedral, probably not Catholics, and they were here last year too. They seemed to be a little less violent.

There was one wackjob who brought a full-sized cross.

This is the one day a year I'm grateful to see the cops.

The SQCF motorcycle gang.

The lighting was just a little off.

Likewise for them.

This float was parked in the sunlight.

Lots of flags.

On the bridge.

I went somewhere a little higher up.

Zoomed in a bit.

Here's the cross dude as the parade started to go by.

Here's when the parade passed the cathedral.

I'm pretty sure "Homosex is sin. Repent!" was exactly what was on the signs held by the Christians protesting the Scouts who were here last year for the Jamboree. My sources who confirmed the sign seemed to have done a mental autocomplete on the word "homosex" though.

The exclamation marks kind of disrupt the logical syntax of the sign. Is there a "We want" in invisible ink there?

I stopped across the street from the west side of Myeong-dong, but traffic turned out to be too heavy, only giving me a short window to see the parade without cars or buses in the way.

The police line between parts of the parade.

Hey, the closed hotel is getting a rebranding.

Discarded Christian signs at a subway exit.

There was a major police line protecting Seoul Plaza, though I'm not sure why.

The event there had started and this is how it looked at maximum capacity. They were playing jazz over the sound system to drown out the Christians across the street.

I found another place to photograph the parade across the street from the gate to Wongudan.

Not as heavily protected as SQCF used to be here.

An anti-LGBTQ protest parade marched by on the opposite side of downtown.

It was big and there were a lot more young participants than I would have expected.

I went back to the SQCF media tent and asked for attendance numbers. Good thing they wrote them down, because they told me "fifteen thousand." The number says 150,000, and I believe the numbers in Korean. The other one is 43,000 parade participants.

These are the guidelines reporters must agree to in order to enter.

A friend I ran into said she was disappointed about the lack of pro-Palestine protesters in the parade. There definitely were a number of them, and it did get reported.