NEW YORK >> The monthlong celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride reached its rainbow-laden crescendo Sunday as huge crowds took part in jubilant, daylong street parties from New York to San Francisco.

Pride celebrations typically weave politics and protest together with colorful pageantry, but this year’s iterations took a decidedly more defiant stance as Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, have sought to roll back LGBTQ+ friendly policies.

The theme of the festivities in Manhattan was, appropriately, “Rise Up: Pride in Protest.” San Francisco’s Pride theme was “Queer Joy is Resistance,” while Seattle was simply “Louder.”

Lance Brammer, a 56-year-old teacher from Ohio attending his first Pride parade in New York, said he felt “validated” as he marveled at the sheer size of the city’s celebration, the nation’s oldest and largest.

“With the climate that we have politically, it just seems like they’re trying to do away with the whole LGBTQ community, especially the trans community,” he said wearing a vivid, multicolored shirt. “And it just shows that they’ve got a fight ahead of them if they think that they’re going to do that with all of these people here and all of the support.”

In San Francisco, Xander Briere said the LGBTQ+ community is fighting for its very survival in the face of sustained attacks and changing public sentiment, particularly against transgender people.

Manhattan’s parade wound its way down Fifth Avenue with more than 700 participating groups greeted by huge crowds.

The rolling celebration passed the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar where a 1969 police raid triggered protests and fired up the LGBTQ+ rights movement. The first pride march, held in New York City in 1970, commemorated the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. The site is now a national monument.

Meanwhile, marchers in San Francisco, host to another of the world’s largest Pride events, headed down the California city’s central Market Street to concert stages set up at the Civic Center Plaza. Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and Toronto were among the other major North American cities that hosted Pride parades Sunday.

Several global cities including Tokyo, Paris and Sao Paulo, held their events earlier this month while others come later in the year, including London in July and Rio de Janeiro in November.