By ANGELA DOLAND
The Associated Press
6/23/01 3:48 PM

PARIS (AP) -- Paris and Berlin celebrated gay pride on Saturday with rollicking parades that drew revelers who held hands, waved rainbow banners and danced to techno beats. The cities' mayors, both openly gay, were at the center of the festivities.

Bertrand Delanoe -- the first Paris mayor to participate in his city's parade -- held a banner reading "All together against discrimination," as he led a parade of tens of thousands in the French capital. Police said there were 250,000 demonstrators and the same number of spectators.

In Berlin, the brightly striped rainbow flag symbolizing the gay rights movement flew over city hall for the first time, as hundreds of thousands turned out to watch or participate in the parade.

Klaus Wowereit, the German capital's mayor, was greeted by cheering crowds as he took to the podium and promised to lead the city in tolerance and to fight politically against the Neo-Nazi scene.

"We won't give the right extremists a finger's width," Wowereit said.

Wowereit was chosen as interim mayor last week by the city parliament only a few months after Delanoe was elected, in a sign of greater acceptance of gay politicians in some parts of Europe.

"Any time there are Parisians fighting for more freedom ... I'm with them," Delanoe, a Socialist who took office in March, told The Associated Press. "This is the seventh year that I've gone to the Gay Pride parade -- it's not just because I've become Paris mayor that I feel I have to take part."

People camped out along the parade route that wound though Paris, past the site of the former Bastille jail, heading north to the Place de la Republique.

One group of marchers lined up to hold an enormous fluttering rainbow flag over their heads. Some marchers dressed casually, other more elaborately. Vincent Agudo, a 32-year-old Parisian, wore a purple feather boa and carried a white parasol.

"I'm here because gay people should have the same rights as everyone else," Agudo said. Like many other marchers, Agudo said he wanted France to lift laws that ban gay people from adopting children.

In 1999, France passed a law giving unmarried couples -- including gays -- some of the same rights as married couples, including the right to file joint tax forms. But France's efforts are considered a step behind several of its neighbors' attempts to promote gay rights.

On Friday, the Belgian government approved a bill to fully legalize same-sex weddings, a measure that, if approved by parliament, would make the country the second in the world to recognize gay marriages, after the Netherlands.

In Berlin, drag queens wearing purple wigs and groups of young men with gay pride mottos painted across their bare chests were among the crowds that packed Berlin's Kurfuerstendamm boulevard for the annual Christopher Street Day parade.

Nicholas Batten, a parade organizer, estimated that as many as 1 million people turned out to watch the parade.

"This year was the biggest ever," said Batten.

The motto of this year's parade, "Berlin stands queer against the right-wing" -- a pun on the German word "quer," which means to stand across something's path -- underlined the event's political aim to fight discrimination.

While Berlin has a history of acceptance of gays that goes back as far as the 19th century, other parts of Germany are more conservative. The government of the state of Bavaria is fighting to prevent a federal law granting rights to same-sex couples from taking effect Aug. 1.

For the first time, Berlin's festivities included civil courage awards recognizing people who fight discrimination in everyday life. A special award was to go to Paul Spiegel, the head of the Jewish community in Germany, who has publicly supported homosexuals in their fight for recognition of persecution suffered under the Nazis.

In Milan, Italy, about 30,000 people -- flanked by colored balloons -- marched through the city center to demand equal rights for gays in a festive parade that featured music and dancing.

But the city of Milan, however, did not support the parade. Vice-Mayor Riccardo De Corato told the ANSA news agency that the municipality did "not share the sentiments of this rally."

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