Future Proofing Pride

PEUGEOT donated £10,000 via the Attitude Magazine Foundation to be divided equally among the 10 winners of the PEUGEOT Attitude PRIDE Awards Europe, supported by British Airways. Each honouree has given £1,000 to a cause close to their heart. Here’s how Diogo Vieira da Silva shared his…

(Photo Markus Bidaux)

Watching WorldPride Madrid in 2017 made Portuguese LGBTQ+ activist Diogo Vieira da Silva stop and think. Why couldn’t his hometown of Porto bring people together in the same way? At that time, Porto Pride existed only as a ticketed party held separate from the march itself.

A relaunch of the event was put in motion. When Porto Pride returned in 2019, it had been rebuilt as a free, visible and community-led event for the city and the wider north of Portugal. Vieira da Silva was part of the team that brought it back, and it has stayed with him since, growing beyond a single celebration to provide spaces for visibility, culture, dialogue, human rights and community across Porto.

His history with the city’s Pride goes back much further. Having grown up in Porto, he first joined its Pride march at 17. He has since spent two decades as an activist, founding several LGBTQ+ organisations in Portugal along the way.

Honoured for his activism at the Awards in July, Vieira da Silva has chosen to give his £1,000 donation, funded by PEUGEOT via the Attitude Foundation, to the organisation he helped relaunch, which has since passed into new hands. “I’m choosing Porto Pride because it represents both an important part of my own journey and something much larger than any individual,” he says. “It belongs to the community and is now being carried forward by a new generation of leaders.”

That handover comes at a difficult moment for the community. “At a time when LGBTQ+ organisations are facing increasing political, social and financial pressure, supporting independent Pride initiatives is essential to ensuring their continuity and protecting the spaces where our community can come together safely and proudly,” Vieira da Silva says.

Porto Pride was kept free by design, and Vieira da Silva sees that accessibility as central to what the organisation stands for: visibility, resistance, solidarity and the demand for full equality. His donation will go directly towards funding its community and human rights work, helping to keep the programme open to all.

For Vieira da Silva, the recognition carries a second meaning beyond the award itself. “It means a great deal to me that this recognition can also generate tangible support for the community,” he says, “and for a project that has been such an important part of my life.”

Support Porto Pride’s human rights work by donating at portopride.com