Organizers say political pressure is the motivation to celebrate pride
Organizers say political pressure is a motivator to continue organizing and congratulating pride, but some business support is declining.
WASHINGTON – In 1975, Deacon McCubin was chatting with his peers at a party in the country’s capital about attending Pride Day in New York City, where a friend threw out a novel idea.
MacCubbin adopted “gambling” a year ago, with the LGBTQ+ bookstore Lambda standing up around the city’s Dupont Circle and determined to find a home for “the story that needs to be said.” Business screams, and bookstores soon become a heaven for the city’s gay community.
So a similar taste and a bit of anxiety – McCubin took another innovative step to launching the District of Columbia’s first Pride Celebration.
“We didn’t know if anyone would show up or not. It was something that had never been done before,” he told USA Today.
When the start time approached its first Pride Day, only one person was crushed around the bookstore. Maccubbin was worried.
“One of the organizers I hired said, ‘Don’t worry, they’re just gay time,'” he recalled. “And about 15 minutes later, there were 2,000 people on the street.”
Fifty years later, DC’s Capital Pride Alliance hosts a global festival that promotes the visibility and awareness of WorldPride -LGBTQ+.
Maccubbin continues to shake up as more than 50 years of activism is under his belt. “The fight continues. There will always be people who will push you back. But you will stand up and keep on moving forward.”
Global Festivals have greater meaning
Starting on May 17th, WorldPride is full of events and celebrations, including music performances, fashion shows, discussion groups, gatherings of sub-communities such as Transpride, Latinx Pride, Youth Pride and more. The festival will march with a city’s Pride Parade on June 7th and a massive rally from the Lincoln Memorial to the U.S. Capitol on June 8th.
Ryan Bos, executive director of DC’s Capital Pride Alliance since 2011, was excited when Group’s bid for WorldPride was accepted in 2022. BOS couldn’t wait to showcase the city’s rich culture on the world stage.
However, he said the festival has taken on a new sense of urgency as threats to LGBTQ+ freedom have started to spiralize over the last few months.
“People are beginning to see this as a more historic moment, something that is necessary to galvanize our community.”
“Who believes in human dignity and decency these days?”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office, due to Daimanle’s diversity, equity and inclusive practices that can provide protection to LGBTQ+ people in the federal government.
As more directives are rolled out, the transgender community is becoming particularly targeted. The administration moved to halt care to maintain the gender of minors, revived the ban on transgender people in the military, removed references to the community from the Stonewall National Memorial website, and directed that federal agencies only recognize two genders.
The action spurred backlash, leading some corporate sponsors to yank support for the Pride Parade, spurring safety concerns for LGBTQ+ people, and even travelling internationally to world-leading festivals.
But the climate is also gritty about global rises that queer communities won’t go anywhere, Boss said.
“People feel…the world is closed. Who has our backs? Who really believes in human dignity and decency these days? We don’t want to go back to our closets. “We become visible. We are a resilient community. We have experienced challenges like these before.”
Historians bring the city’s strange history back to life
Katherine Fisher is the founder and lead guide of DC Pridewalks, the city’s first tourism company dedicated to highlighting the strange history of the nation’s capital from the monuments to the neighbourhood.
Historian Fisher started Pridewalks in 2021 after a former LGBTQ+ student who dealt with addiction and other struggles “losed the community” during Covid-19–death of an overdose. Fisher, who studied queer history in graduate school, said the tragedy “little me.”
She wants to bring Washington’s LGBTQ+ history from academic books to public discourse, and encourage engagement and activity, even among allies, through walks. As WorldPride took the DC stage at a challenging time, Fisher says a friend from the LGBTQ+ community has decided to “fight back with joy and celebration.”
Fear often drives false assumptions about LGBTQ+ people, she said. Fisher hopes that her tours will help educate people and stop those misunderstandings.
“When I take people on the streets and talk about someone called Evelyn Hooker, no one ever heard of her,” she said. “But she’s important to the rights movement as odd as Rosa’s civil rights and Eleanor Roosevelt’s parks to women’s rights.”
‘Ah, no no no! You can’t take this from us.”
Country singer/songwriter Brooke Eden, who plays on World Pride, recalls being warned to “stay in the closet.”
She found comfort and treatment in songwriting and was able to come out five years later. Eden married his wife, Hilary in Nashville in 2022, and the couple welcomed their first child in November.
Her music helps her to share her journey and hopes that her words will touch and improve others who may be struggling with acceptance.
Eden said, “People who have never seen the story in country music, and it’s flooded with messages from people who had one of my videos played on CMT, YouTube and Tiktok.
One of Eden’s hit songs is “Outlaw Love.” She believes it will fully resonate with WorldPride as “the outlaw movement, a kind of rebellion.”
“The World Pride Stage is in front of the Capitol building as they are trying to silence us, put us back in our closets, feel embarrassed, take away much of our freedom and pull Day back,” she said.
“And we’re like this: “Oh, no no no! We’re going to the capital of the country. We’ll be bigger than ever. You can’t take this from us. We’ll become ourselves.”
