Billie Jean King to be grand marshal of NYC pride march

Rainbow flags and parade floats are the order of the day in New York City and in cities around the world in celebration of gay pride.

Tennis legend Billie Jean King will be one of the grand marshals of New York City’s gay pride march, along with transgender advocate Tyler Ford and civil rights organization Lambda Legal.

The marches commemorate the riots that erupted in response to a police raid at a New York gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in June 1969. A park across the street from the Stonewall was designated a national monument in 2016.

New York’s march will pass by the Stonewall National Monument in the Greenwich Village on Sunday before heading up Fifth Avenue.

To coincide with the event, a New York state memorial to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people that honors victims of intolerance opened to the public on Sunday.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo officially unveiled the monument in Hudson River Park in Manhattan. It has nine boulders with pieces of glass installed in them that can act as prisms and reflect rainbows in sunlight. It was designed by artist Anthony Goicolea, of Brooklyn.

Cuomo formed the commission to come up with an LGBT memorial after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando that left 49 people dead.

The march will be both a celebration of the diversity of LGBT culture and a protest against anti-LGBT policies promoted by President Donald Trump, such as Trump’s attempt to ban all transgender people from serving in the military.

The theme of this year’s march is “Defiantly Different.” Eighty floats and tens of thousands of marchers are expected.

March organizers plan to honor “community heroes,” including Parkland, Florida, school shooting survivor Emma Gonzales.