Dhaka Pride : From the Heart of Bangladesh

Dhaka Pride: From the Heart of Bangladesh 🇧🇩

Dhaka Pride is an annual LGBTQ+ Pride festival highlighting the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, and celebrating the courage, dignity, diversity, and resilience of LGBTIQ+ people from Bangladesh and across the Bangladeshi diaspora. Held online on the first Friday of June, Dhaka Pride is the only publicly accessible Pride event in Bangladesh and provides a vital platform for visibility, expression, solidarity, and human rights advocacy.

Dhaka Pride was introduced in 2020 during Covid-19, when various pride events were taking place online and officially launched in 2021 by Inclusive Bangladesh alongside the Copenhagen Worldpride 2021. Since then, it has continued as an annual virtual Pride celebration, bringing together LGBTIQ+ community members, artists, activists, allies, and partner organisations from Bangladesh and around the world. Due to the legal, social, and security challenges faced by LGBTIQ+ people in Bangladesh, the main Pride festival is not held as an offline public event. Instead, Dhaka Pride has built a courageous and groundbreaking digital model that allows Pride to reach people safely across Bangladesh and beyond.

Alongside its annual online Pride festival, Dhaka Pride also organises and supports various in-person and creative initiatives throughout the year, including exhibitions, human rights forums, art showcases, Pride publications, community gatherings, and thematic cultural events.

These activities create meaningful opportunities for local Bangladeshi LGBTIQ+ community members, artists, advocates, and allies to participate, share their stories, build solidarity, and increase the visibility of LGBTIQ+ lives, rights, and experiences within and beyond the community.

At its heart, Dhaka Pride is more than a festival. It is a statement of hope, resistance, and belonging. In a country where many LGBTIQ+ people are forced to live with silence, stigma, and fear, Dhaka Pride creates spaces where people can come together, express themselves, celebrate identity, and raise awareness about equality, dignity, and human rights.

Inclusive Bangladesh currently serves as the host organisation of Dhaka Pride, coordinating the event with partner organisations from Bangladesh and international Pride movements. Dhaka Pride delegates also take part in Pride events around the world, including WorldPride, to strengthen global visibility, solidarity, and representation for Bangladeshi LGBTIQ+ communities.

Operating in a highly hostile environment with oppressive laws and social barriers, Dhaka Pride stands as a beacon of hope and a blueprint for LGBTIQ+ organisations in countries where public Pride celebrations cannot be safely held offline. By taking Pride into the digital space while also creating carefully designed community-based cultural and human rights initiatives, Dhaka Pride ensures that love, dignity, equality, and community can reach every corner of Bangladesh and connect Bangladeshi LGBTIQ+ people with the wider global Pride movement.

Dhaka Pride is a proud member of InterPride, the International Organisation of Pride Organisers, and remains committed to promoting the human rights, visibility, creativity, and dignity of Bangladeshi LGBTIQ+ people worldwide.

In 2026, Dhaka Pride and its founder, Tushar Kanti Baidya, received the Troy Perry Legacy Award for Outstanding Human Rights Leadership at WorldPride Amsterdam, Netherlands. The award celebrates courageous LGBTIQ+ leaders and organisations creating change through human-rights, community and spiritual activism. It honours Rev. Troy D. Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Churches and a pioneer who united faith, Pride and the struggle for equality. This recognition highlights Dhaka Pride’s work to strengthen the visibility, dignity and belonging of LGBTIQ+ Bangladeshis. It also acknowledges the wider work of Inclusive Bangladesh, a feminist and transgender-led human-rights organisation established in 2013. Through advocacy, research, rights documentation, emergency support, youth leadership and community development, it addresses discrimination, violence and exclusion. Inclusive Bangladesh's interfaith dialogue and religious-literacy programmes challenge misinformation, reduce stigma and promote peace among diverse communities. By bringing faith and human rights into respectful conversation, Inclusive Bangladesh affirms that equality and belief can coexist peacefully.

The Story Behind the Dhaka Pride Logo

The Dhaka Pride logo is a celebration of Bangladesh’s vibrant cultural identity, Bengali folk traditions, South Asian heritage, and the resilience and diversity of its LGBTIQ+ communities. Every element of the logo carries a story, bringing together familiar symbols of home, love, pride, resistance, and new beginnings.

At the heart of the logo is a rooster inspired by the colourful folk imagery of Bangladeshi rickshaw art. The rooster is a familiar presence across rural Bangladesh, where its call at dawn traditionally marks the beginning of a new day. Within the Dhaka Pride logo, it therefore represents awakening, hope and the courage to begin again—a reminder that every person deserves the freedom to imagine and build a life in which they can live authentically.

The rooster’s vibrant plumage incorporates the colours of Pride, visibly embracing queer identity within a distinctly Bangladeshi cultural image. Rather than separating queerness from culture, the design places the two together: queer people are part of Bangladesh, its communities, its traditions and its continuing story.

The rooster is depicted marching forward while carrying a rose, a timeless symbol of love. Its movement represents Dhaka Pride’s journey for love, dignity, equality and belonging—not only across Bangladesh, but in solidarity with communities around the world. The rose reminds us that at the centre of Pride is something deeply human: the freedom to love, to be loved and to live with dignity.

The rooster also carries a symbolic tribute to the wider South Asian hijra cultural and spiritual heritage, including traditions associated with Bahuchara Mata, a Hindu goddess connected with fertility, chastity and power and revered within sections of the hijra community in South Asia.

Through this reference, the logo acknowledges gender diversity as something deeply rooted in the history and cultural traditions of our region, not something foreign or newly introduced.

The floral element further draws upon the decorative language of Bengali folk and rickshaw art, connecting Pride with the colour, creativity and visual heritage of Bangladesh. The words “Dhaka Pride”, written in both Bangla and English, affirm the movement’s local roots while speaking to a global community. Their navy-blue colour represents trust, loyalty, stability, authority and quiet strength, qualities that reflect the determination and resilience of Bangladesh’s LGBTIQ+ communities.

Together, these elements make the Dhaka Pride logo more than a visual identity. It is a story of heritage and hope, queerness and culture, love and resistance. The rooster marches forward carrying love—from the heart of Bangladesh to the world.

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