In a first, ABC News is doing a live national (streaming) broadcast on Sunday that will span the LGBTQ Pride celebrations and parades in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, with special correspondents covering each.
Pride parade coverage is nothing new for the national news outlets and their local affiliates. But ABC is doing what they're calling an "unprecedented streaming event" live on Hulu that will feature hours-long coverage of three parades and city celebrations — with New York, Chicago, and San Francisco all celebrating Pride the same weekend, which is the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion.
The show, called Pride Across America, will stream online on ABC News Live starting at 8 a.m. Pacific Time (11 a.m. EDT) Sunday, June 25, and simultaneously on Hulu. And the fun will kick off in New York City, with four on-air personalities: Good Morning America Saturday and Sunday co-anchor Gio Benitez, "GMA3: What You Need to Know" co-anchor Eva Pilgrim, ABC Audio's "Life Out Loud" host and ABC News contributor LZ Granderson, and Hulu's Drag Me To Dinner host Murray Hill.
Correspondent Alex Perez and Chief Meteorologist Ginger Zee will be covering the Chicago Pride festivities. And KABC's Christiane Cordero and senior Washington reporter Devin Dwyer will be live from Market Street in San Francisco.
And because it's their latest and greatest piece of queer content currently, ABC and Hulu will be heavily promoting Drag Me to Dinner throughout. (ICYMI, this is the slightly cringe-y, mock-style reality competition show featuring pairs of drag queens throwing themed dinner parties, with the very low-stakes conclusion of winning a "golden grater" for the best dinner party. The show, clearly the brainchild of Neil Patrick Harris and husband David Burtka, is short on wit, but it was the final screen appearance of SF's dear departed Heklina.)
There's going to be a "Pass Me the Mic" bit throughout the show, ABC tells us, in which the Drag Me to Dinner cast — Harris, Burtka, Hill, Bianca Del Rio, and Haneefah Wood — and others all share "how they keep their pride going" throughout the year.
"Pride Across America" will be a five-hour live broadcast — which means it will wrap up at 1 p.m. PT, which should be approximately halfway through the Apple contingent in SF's Pride parade, and nowhere near the end of our parade.
The SF Pride parade starts rolling at 10:30 a.m., with the Dykes on Bikes starting their engines at the Embarcadero and riding up Market Street to Eighth Street.
And in some depressing related news, a bunch of small Pride flags adorning a fence at Stonewall Monument National Park in NY's Greenwich Village were just vandalized for the third time in a week, as ABC News reports. While the vandalism of Pride flags has been ongoing in all parts of the country, it's especially sad that this is happening in the heart of gay New York, across the street from the bar that launched the LGBTQ rights movement. The NYPD's Hate Crimes Task Force is reportedly investigating the vandalism, but no arrests have been made.
Photo: YS/Unsplash