While the rain likely dampened the turnout of the territory’s sixth annual Hong Kong Pride Parade, more people are said to have attended this year than in the last.

An estimated 3,000 people (according to AFP) to 9,000 participants (according to organizers) marched despite the rain to demand equal rights as well as legislation outlawing discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.

According to the police, 4,700 people attended at the peak of the march, compared with 4,500 last year.

Two key figures in the Occupy protests, Federation of Students leaders Alex Chow Yong-kang and Lester Shum jpined the parade and backed the call for equal rights for gays.

‘Regardless of whether you are gay, bisexual or transgender, we all have the moral responsibility to speak out. Stand up to change the world. Confront unreasonable pride, prejudice, cruelty and indifference,’ Chow, the federation’s secretary general, told the crowd, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported.

Parade spokeswoman Alice Wei Siu-lik said ‘umbrella movement’ supporters had boosted the turnout of the march but did not give an estimate.

Last month organizers announced that Hong Kong pride has taken the umbrella as its symbol in solidarity with the city’s democracy movement.

Going from Victoria Park to Tamar Park, marchers past Hong Kong’s central government offices where democracy protesters have been camped out since September 29 to demand free leadership elections for the semi-autonomous city. At the height of the protests, hundreds of thousands of students, activists, ordinary citizens, and politicians took to the streets forcing several major roads to be shut down for days.

The move to link the democracy and gay-rights movements was not welcomed by some parties.

The Post quoted Roger Wong, the father of Scholarism founder and convenor Joshua Wong – the 18-year-old student who has been widely hailed as the public face of the pro-democracy protests – as saying that it is ‘inappropriate to bundle a gay movement with a movement for democracy and freedom.’

The senior Wong heads Family School Sexual Orientation Discrimination Ordinance Concern Group, an anti-gay-rights group which fiercely opposes anti-discrimination legislation on the basis of sexual orientation.

Last month the group accused the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) of perverting family values by seeking public opinions on whether unmarried couples should be protected under anti-discrimination laws. The public statement, which carried the signatures of nearly 100 primary and secondary school principals, said that such changes would make it hard for schools to conduct moral and ethical education, reported the Post.

EOC chairperson Dr York Chow Yat-ngok is said to have joined the parade for the second time, despite criticism from anti-gay groups last year.