Looking back on Pride's 25 years

Philadelphia Gay News www.epgn.com June 7-13, 2013 PRIDEPAGE 24

By Jen [email protected]

For 25 years, Philly Pride Presents has brought together thousands of people from throughout the city, region and country to celebrate the LGBT community. Just as the community has gone through a tremendous evolution in those years, the event itself has seen changes in format and focus. The modern Pride parade and festival, organized by Philly Pride Presents, trace their roots to an organization called Lesbian & Gay Pride of the Delaware Valley, Inc., founded in 1989. The previous year, a group of LGBTs staged an impromptu march to Love Park, where the Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Task Force was having a rally. “They had this spontaneous parade and it was so successful that they got together and said, ‘We should do this every year,’” said Philly Pride Presents Chuck Volz. “And that’s when the Pride group was born.” Philly Pride Presents executive director Franny Price, owner of Spruce Street Video, said she and her store workers turned out to support marchers in the 1988 event. “We heard there was going to be a march to Love Park and they were going to be passing the video store so we made a banner that said, ‘Spruce Street Video salutes gay Pride,’ and we stood out on the corner,” she said. That effort, however, was not the city’s first Pride event. “The first parade was long before that, in 1972,” explained William Way LGBT Community Center archivist Bob Skiba. The route for that early parade went from the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to Rittenhouse Square, as the area west of Broad Street used to be one of the city’s largest hubs of LGBT activity. The 1989 event, which coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, cul-minated in a rally at Love Park. Shortly after the inception of the Pride agency, the festival moved to Penn’s Landing. In 2000, the event was staged at a lot near Columbus Boulevard and South Street, when there was planned construction at Penn’s Landing. It also spent two years at Festival Pier at Penn’s Landing, a loca-tion Price said was too far removed from the Gayborhood, and two years at a lot at Broad Street and Washington Avenue. It came back to Penn’s Landing’s Great Plaza in 2007 and now draws about 10,000 people annually. Volz, who started volunteering with the group in 1994, said early planning for the festival was a lengthy, tedious process. While the event is still a massive undertak-ing, it has been streamlined, he said. “We used 3-by-5 sheets of paper with a big outline of Penn’s Landing trying to pencil in where all the vendors went. And back then, every board member took home about 200 envelopes to hand-address because we were sending them out to every business and gay

Looking back on Pride’s 25 years

Photos: Courtesy John J. Wilcox Jr. LGBT Archives

Philadelphia Gay News www.epgn.com June 7-13, 2013PRIDE PAGE 25

group in the tri-state area,” he said. “Now, our mailing labels are all on the computer, my map of Penn’s Landing is in a graphic-arts program. We’ve definitely refined the process in those ways.” The organization has also done a good job managing its finances, Volz said. “Early on, there was a time where the organization was $35,000 in debt. And you just can’t run an organization like that and be further and further in debt like that every year,” he said. “We’re financially healthy now, and that’s a really big plus.” Philly Pride Presents’ board also oper-ates without a hierarchy, such as a presi-dent or vice president, a feature Volz said is unusual for a community group but which helps organizers work collaboratively with one another and the rest of the community. The event has increasingly grown in importance as a community-network event, Price added. When the festival started, it featured sev-

eral dozen vendors, and now boasts more than 140, the majority of which are LGBT and ally organizations. “It’s a great networking event,” Price said. “Most of our vendors are organiza-tions doing outreach that day. It’s turned very much into a community event. It’s probably the biggest LGBT networking day in the city each year.” But the list of parade contingents and vendors has also become increasingly diversified, Volz said, to include non-LGBT entities. “We have big places like Verizon and Comcast who want a tent now,” Volz said. “I think it shows the gradual LGBT accep-tance in society and the mainstreaming of the gay community that these big corpora-tions want to be involved.” While Pride has seen tremendous growth in the past 25 years, the journey hasn’t always been a smooth one. With an early summer timeframe, weather

has always been a concern, Price said, and it was especially an issue in 2000, when the temperature reached 103, with a heat index of 110. “We had 12 people pass out that year,” Price said. “That was the worst year for the heat.” No matter the weather, Price said, the event’s entertainment has always kept the crowds big. Among the most memorable headliners were comedians Judy Tenuta and Phyllis Diller, actor/comedian Sandra Bernhard and actor Harvey Fierstein, who Price said was one of the first big names the agency secured. “We always try to have someone unique, that no one else would think of,” Price said. “And often, after we have them, the follow-ing year you hear about them being at this Pride or that Pride. After we had Wendy Williams, she did something like seven Prides around the country. We always try to be unique and different with headliners that

you wouldn’t get to see anywhere else.” In addition to the ongoing growth of the event, Price said, the crowd has gotten increasingly younger, a byproduct of the evolution of LGBT acceptance. “About three or four years ago, you’d look at the front of the stage and most of the people sitting on the steps would be in their late 20s or 30s, but now the crowd lit-erally goes right up to the stage and it’s full of teenagers,” Price said. “People are com-ing out younger and younger and younger, which is really exciting to me.” But the increased acceptance of the com-munity doesn’t negate the importance of Pride celebrations, Skiba noted. “I think a lot of people think we don’t need Pride anymore, but I believe firmly we do,” he said. “We’ve come a remark-able way, even in the past five years, but things happen every day that remind us that we still have a long way to go. And Pride events are an important part of that.” ■

Photos: Courtesy John J. Wilcox Jr. LGBT Archives and Scott A. Drake