Like so many other events, St Pete Pride looks a little different this year—and that is intentional. The coronavirus pandemic forced us to cancel our plans in 2020, and St Pete Pride chose to lean into the uniqueness of these unprecedented times by reimagining how we celebrate Pride.
For the better part of a decade, Creative Loafing Tampa Bay has worked in concert with St. Pete Pride on production and distribution of its event guide, and despite a pandemic that forced an all-out cancellation of Pride last year, CL and St. Pete Pride teamed up again in 2021 for a standalone guide on stands through the month of June. This piece by Nathan Bruemmer, Board President and acting ED is pulled from that guide.
We started with the most pressing problem of how to safely hold an event that drew over 265,000 people in 2019. The safety and well-being of our guests, vendors, volunteers, and all of our neighbors in St. Petersburg must always be at the forefront of Pride events. We also recognized that 2020 also highlighted the resilience of protests around the globe, as citizens called out corruption, electoral manipulation, and police brutality.
After witnessing and reflecting on the events of this past year, we embraced the belief that We All Rise Together, and are inspired to work towards a more inclusive Pride where the voices of Black, Brown and Trans communities are centered. We are proud to honor our LGBTQ+ community and provide an opportunity to connect and celebrate each other.
Beginning with safety and public health concerns, it would be impossible to gather 200,000+ people downtown along the waterfront for our annual St Pete Pride Parade. Similarly, the Pride Festival in the Grand Central District could not be held safely for the 50,000+ people it usually draws. Yet we felt the loss of cancelation in 2020. How could we do this safely in 2021?
We met with city officials and public health experts, reviewed the CDC guidelines, and creatively imagined how to spread people out over space and time in order to create a socially distanced Pride. PrideFest was born!
This new format of four themed weeks in June with four outdoor events spread over four Saturdays allows us to celebrate Pride while following pandemic guidelines and it allows our community partners to safely host dozens of other events as well!
After reworking the logistics of time and space, we knew it was time to focus on healing our hearts. 2020 was a hard year. As we begin to come out of the pandemic, we grieve those lost
to illness, violence, and despair. As we reflect on the protests that occurred in our backyard and all over the world, we remember that Pride, too, was born from rebellion. And as we embrace the ideal that We All Rise Together, we recognize that we must reach out and create new partnerships.
Since pandemic guidelines state that we must limit the number of attendees, we are selling tickets for each event. We are using this new structure to develop new community partnerships by donating a portion of our ticket sales to several amazing lo-
cal organizations. We encourage you to learn more about them and hope you will support them.
We often refer to the social justice advocacy of Pride as “the work.” And it is most definitely work. However, St Pete Pride is honored to engage in this work and advocate for LGBGTQ+ people and for our community. As we move forward, St Pete Pride encourages others to join in our fight for equity. We encourage everyone to celebrate their Pride because we are strong, we are resilient, and We All Rise Together.
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This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2021.