This week, Provincetown is getting all worked up for the annual Carnival Parade ……its yet another week where we celebrate Pride and where most of us will be preparing our skimpiest outfits to honor the theme, Deep Sea Disco.  This is, after all, Pride Month, where (most of) the world will be celebrating.  Slightly less than normal since the Orange Man’s wretched DEI policies are giving companies excuses to withdraw their usual support and sponsorship.

We may be dressing down here in Massachusetts, but they will be getting out their warm clothes for their Pride Festival in Longyearbyen in the Norwegian High Arctic.  This is a town where polar bears roam wild and the dark season is months long and the town is the largest settlement on Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard archipelago.…….if you have an atlas handy, at 78 degrees north, it sits halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, making it the world’s northernmost permanent settlement. Though Svalbard spans an area only slightly smaller than Ireland, fewer than 3,000 people live across its scattered settlements.

When in 2019, Lene Jeanette Dyngeland was in her third year of living in Longyearbyen, the largest settlement on Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard archipelago, she began putting handmade posters all over town, inviting people to take part in a new celebration; Longyearbyen Pride was born. 

“I haven’t noticed anything here in Longyearbyen that discriminates by sexuality,” she told the crowd of almost 600 people who turned up in bright colours that day, carrying Pride flags as they marched from the village’s school hall to the Radisson Blu Polar Hotel. “But we have to remember that the world is a big place.”

Among the marchers were Svalbard’s governor (known as the ‘Sysselmann’), police leaders, firefighters, teachers, and families. Also present was the village priest, Siv Limstrand, who has been active in the Pride movement in her native Trondheim for over 25 years. As the parade came to an end, a rare Longyearbyen rainbow appeared overhead. For the first four years, she paid for everything out of her own pocket; eventually, community funding eased some of the financial strain. What began as a small celebration has since grown into a three-day festival, with a free cinema, children’s activities, church ceremonies, and even a Pride cruise around Svalbard’s fjords.

It all makes a great deal of sense when one looks at Norway’s long history and culture  of supporting LGBTQ+ rights, which goes back to 1981 when it became the first country to enact a law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation  same-sex marriage has been legal since 2009, and couples enjoy equal rights in areas including adoption and church weddings.

Its no wonder on the  2026 ILGA Europe Rainbow Europe map, which ranks 49 countries on their legal and policy frameworks for LGBTQ+ people, Norway ranked eighth.

The city has a sense of Pride which goes way beyond their annual 3-day Celebrations. As of 2016, legal gender can be changed without medical intervention. So-called ‘conversion therapy’ was outlawed in 2024. LGBTQ+ people can serve openly in the armed forces, and it is one of the few countries to explicitly protect intersex people from discrimination.  Proposals have also been put forward to fast-track visa applications for trans people fleeing persecution in the United States.  

@longyearbyenpride