I was opposite two huge 17^th-century mansions, one of which is inhabited by a family that’s been in Amsterdam for more than four centuries. The balconies and front stairs of these icons of the past were crammed with people waving rainbow flags. The street in front of them was packed with people cheering for a boat of dancing drag queens. So were the people in the boats on the riverside and the historic canal bridges on either side of the houses. The government buildings behind them and to their left were waving huge rainbow flags.

Without warning, I burst into tears, the kind that feels like choking. Two days earlier, I’d found the interrogation notes of the first four men executed in Amsterdam. They’d each been interrogated multiple times over months, each desperate to save their own lives without accusing anyone else. I knew as I slowly deciphered the spidery handwriting that two of them would be strangled then burned and two of them would be drowned. I’d already seen a print of the flyer announcing their execution.

All I could think is what it would mean to them, to see what Amsterdam would become. Yes, we still have a long way to go. But it is a monumental thing that the entire city celebrates the rights and freedoms of a tiny part of the population, one that has been brutalized and denigrated for hundreds of years.

Remembering the past isn’t just about remembering its victims or its heroes, though we should. It is a marker by which we can see how far we have come and a warning of what we could slip back into if every person who wore rainbows last Saturday doesn’t carry the fight through the rest of the year. The next boat showed how we can build the world we hope for.

It was full of LGBTQ-supporting parents who called themselves the “boat for the future”. So many of my generation clung on by our fingernails until we were 18, while our friends who came out – or were outed – lived on the street. The only supportive parents I remember from my group of friends in the ‘90s were a lesbian couple and an elder sister who’d become her sister’s guardian.

The children of the parents in that boat are growing up in a world in which the entire city turns out to celebrate them, and their parents celebrate their orientation instead of trying to punish it out of them. Their straight and cis peers are growing up in a world where they have annual encouragement to accept and celebrate diversity of gender and sexual orientation. I can’t imagine what it would be to grow up like that. I can’t wait to see what these kids will do.