Story: Parades and protest marches

The Hero parade along Auckland’s Ponsonby Road formed part of the annual Hero festival. It began in the early 1990s to promote gay and lesbian pride. The parades were highly sexualised, with scantily-clad ‘marching boys’ and voluptuous drag queens. Moralists condemned the parade on these grounds, while other critics said it promoted a narrow view of homosexuality. But most of the tens of thousands who turned out for the spectacle loved it.