But this year, as first reported by NBC News, all requests were nixed. US diplomats in Jerusalem joined a March for Pride and Tolerance, and several ambassadors have tweeted photos of themselves in local Pride parades or standing outside the embassies surrounded by employees holding up letters spelling PRIDE.Ī group from the US Embassy in Denmark participated in Copenhagen Pride Week's grand parade in 2018.Ī practice routinely approved for most of the decade at many embassies now requires top-level approval from the State Department. The Vienna Embassy's website features a photo of a rainbow flag flying below Old Glory on a mast jutting from the building, a statement by Diplomats for Equality and a story about a professor lecturing on the visibility and growth of LGBT rights. The website for the embassy in Santiago, Chile, shows a video of the chief diplomat raising a rainbow flag last month for the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia.

The facades of the US missions in Seoul and Chennai, India, are partially hidden behind large rainbow flags, while the embassy in New Delhi is aglow in rainbow coloured lights. Since the US State Department began rejecting all embassy requests to hoist rainbow flags outside the mission buildings during Gay Pride Month this year, some US diplomats have been finding ways to defy, or at least get around, the new policy.