Paris and Berlin host gay pride day

PARIS, France -- Tens of thousands of people partied in the centres of Paris and Berlin to celebrate gay pride.

Saturday's rollicking parades drew revellers who held hands, waved rainbow banners or danced to techno beats wearing feather boas and purple wigs.

The cities' mayors, both openly gay, were at the centre of the festivities.

Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, a Social Democrat elected last week, was to address the crowd following the parade that drew hundreds of thousands.

Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, gripping a banner reading "All together against discrimination," led a crowd of tens of thousands.

"Any time there are Parisians fighting for more freedom ... I'm with them," Delanoe, a Socialist who took office in March, told The Associated Press.

"This is the seventh year that I've gone to the Gay Pride parade -- it's not just because I've become Paris mayor that I feel I have to take part."

In Paris, people camped out on both sides of the street to watch the parade that was to wind from the Porte Doree in eastern Paris past the site of the former Bastille jail, heading north to the Place de la Republique.

One group of marchers lined up to hold an enormous fluttering rainbow flag over their heads.

Some marchers dressed casually in t-shirts and sunglasses, while others were dressed to the nines.

Vincent Agudo, a 32-year-old Parisian, wore a purple feather boa and carried a white parasol.

"I'm here because gay people should have the same rights as everyone else," he said. Like many other marchers, Agudo said he wanted France to lift laws that ban gay people from adopting children.

In Berlin, drag queens wearing purple wigs and groups of young men with gay pride mottos painted across their bare chests were among the crowds that packed Berlin's Kurfuerstendamm boulevard for the annual Christopher Street Day parade.

Organisers were hoping attendance this year would top the more than 400,000 who attended last year's event.

The motto of this year's parade, "Berlin stands queer against the right-wing" -- a wordplay on the German word "quer" which means to stand crosswise in the path of something -- underlined the event's political aim to fight discrimination.

German police said around 500,000 had attended the city's annual tribute to homosexuals.

They marched more than five km (three miles) through the centre of Berlin, led by 80 parade wagons.

Many were clad in leather but some took to the streets in nothing more than their underwear.

The parade, an annual event in Berlin since 1979, began near the Kurfuerstendamm shopping avenue and wended its way through the government quarter.

While Berlin has a history as a gay metropolis that goes back as far as the 19th century, other parts of the country have been less willing to embrace the liberal scene.

The conservative southern state of Bavaria is currently fighting a law that would grant rights to same-sex couples.