It began 20 years ago, when a handful of friends gathered for an informal picnic on the banks of the Hillsborough River. Then, as Tampa's lesbians and gays gained courage and visibility, their annual celebrations of pride and community grew and grew.
One high point: the convergence of pride weekend with an international gay and lesbian choral festival in July 1996. The festival brought more out-of-towners than any convention the city had ever hosted, and a substantial part of the city's business community went out of their way to welcome it. Mayor Dick Greco spoke to thousands of PrideFest revelers at the Tampa Convention Center, and television news highlighted a poignant scene in which a male chorus from Los Angeles sang "We Shall Overcome" in a cappella harmony to a cluster of silent protesters from the Ku Klux Klan.
By the turn of the millennium, Tampa Bay Pride promoters were touting their annual line-up as the largest gay pride event in Florida, and the second largest in the Southeast.
But there was something gnawing at the center of it.
A few people began raising questions about the producing organization's governance and direction; about its strong ties to the adult entertainment industry; and about the festival's relative lack of emphasis on politics and community-building, the original purpose of gay pride celebrations here and across the country. The small group who led the organization, meanwhile, grappled with the perennial challenge of producing a major event on the backs of time-stretched and easily distracted volunteers.
Now, after a disastrous move to Raymond James Stadium in 2002, the Greater Tampa Bay Pride Organization Inc. has collapsed under the weight of more than $300,000 in unpaid debts, as well as allegations of financial improprieties, conflicts of interest and drug abuse.
Donald L. Bentz, a diminutive man with a carefully coiffed mullet hairdo, long considered a community hero for his efforts behind PrideFest and other fundraising activities, had been the president of Tampa Bay Pride since the mid-1990s. Bentz hoped to escape the organization's problems by declaring it bankrupt and starting a new group to produce this year's events.
But those plans remain tentative — dependent, as Bentz acknowledges, on his ability to find enough commercial sponsors willing to overlook the bad publicity and still unanswered questions about last year's finances.
The possible end of Tampa's annual gay pride festival — mitigated in part by plans for a new event across the bay in St. Petersburg — may matter most to the area's estimated 120,000 gay men and lesbians.
But it is also an instructive tale for any nonprofit organization that purports to serve its community — how ambition, naivete, an overly insulated group of leaders and a community's changing tastes and expectations can make even the fanciest plans go astray.
Bentz and two other men who led the ill-fated former organization, meanwhile, are grappling with their own financial losses and the damage to their once solid reputations. Bentz says he lost $47,000 of his own money on pride events last year. Bud Bromwell says he's out $62,000. Jim Johnson claims a loss of nearly $40,000. None wants anything to do with the others.
Some gay community leaders have taken sides; others have chosen to stay above the fray. At the very least, says Brian Feiss, publisher of the gay-oriented monthly Gazette, "It's an embarrassment to the gay community."
Bentz acknowledges that his attempt to use bankruptcy to stay in the game has earned him critics. But, he says, "Tampa deserves a Pride. The new team understands we need to get back to the way we used to do it. After one bad year, my detractors want to crucify me when they were team decisions."
"He doesn't want to go out on a note like last year," observes Rick Walen, the Pride organization's former treasurer. "He has put the debt behind him. The question becomes, is it fair and is it right to leave people holding the bag, even if he's one of them?"
The Three Entrepreneurs
Local pride celebrations passed through a number of groups until the Greater Tampa Bay Pride Organization Inc. took the helm in the early '90s and established PrideFest. Bentz became president in '96 and helped build the event into quite the to-do. It included a parade, an array of parties, a business expo, celebrity guests and speakers, and its benchmark, the Wet Party.
For the last few years, that bash was held at the Florida Aquarium and drew 3,000 mostly gay men equipped with squirt-guns, energized by techno music and titillated by professional podium dancers who worked in the gay porn industry.
Bentz says the soiree made $10,000-$25,000 a year, nearly all of which was used to fund other Pride events. Although PrideFest kept growing, the organization was hardly flush. One of its biggest shortfalls was people. Volunteers were scarce. Board members came, burned out and went.
Bentz originally envisioned that his nonprofit would be a primary fundraiser for a coalition of gay charities, but there was never any money to spread around.
In late 2001, Bentz enlisted Johnson, who in 1996 had produced the first Wet Party in association with the Tampa Bay Gay Men's Chorus. Johnson also specialized in lining up and coordinating liquor sponsorships at gay-themed circuit parties along the East Coast. A small construction contractor who once owned a steel door business, he was seduced by the chance to grow PrideFest and become more involved in party promotion.
Bentz also brought in Bromwell, who had come to Greater Tampa Bay Pride as a volunteer and almost immediately took over its website. He had experience with his own gay-oriented local site, QueerTampa.com, a PrideFest sponsor. Bromwell, too, was seeking a more fulfilling professional life. A couple of years earlier, he had dropped out of the Hillsborough Community College paramedic program just before his internship was to begin.
Bentz came up with a plan. The threesome, each with distinct talents but pushed to the breaking point by donating so much of their time, would contract with Tampa Bay Pride to render their services for a modest salary through 2002 ($7,550 to Johnson, $9,000 to Bromwell and $24,000 to Bentz). Johnson and Bromwell also stood to make 10 percent of net proceeds from select Pride events, while Bentz was due five percent of anything that exceeded $50,000 profit. While not banking a lot of dough, they figured they would be doing what they loved and building on a dream. Bromwell and Johnson joined the six-member board and their contracts were rubber-stamped. As it turned out, not enough money came in to pay off the contracts. Johnson got his in full, Bentz took $8,000 and Bromwell never received a cent.
In another gambit, the trio formed separate nonprofit companies for several events, most notably moneymakers the Wet Party and Pillage & Plunder, a gay cruise featuring porn stars. They trademarked the names, each taking an equal share.
Flush with entrepreneurial spirit, these men ignored obvious red flags. They seemed to forget that Greater Tampa Bay Pride was registered as a not-for-profit company. Deviously or not, they hijacked decision-making power from board supervision. They would soon mix personal funds in with Pride dollars, further graying the lines. Although their mission was ostensibly to serve the community, it's apparent now that their strongest motivations lay in serving themselves. It's no surprise, then, that when the venture turned bad, the men turned on each other.
Personality Problems
"You could tell right away that within the three of them there were personality problems," says Jon Park, who served on the board at the time.
Johnson, a dour sort, preferred to go about his business unencumbered of bureaucratic checks and balances. We met one April afternoon at a Rio Bravo restaurant on North Dale Mabry. Dressed in paint-spotted jeans and T-shirt, his thinning hair closely cropped, the 39-year-old Tampa native laid out the details of the deal gone sour in a grim, humorless monotone. He's the most philosophical about the imbroglio. "I'm not blaming anyone, except all of us," he says. Johnson figures that the $39,000 he lost on last year's PrideFest is simply part of the lumps he has to take.
Bromwell, 38, met me at his tastefully appointed bungalow on Columbus Avenue in Ybor City, one of four properties on the street he owns with his life partner. He's tall and slender, with a natural charm. He grew up in small-town Iowa, the son of a Mormon minister who was a full-time steel mill worker.
By most accounts, he has a temper. When Bromwell saw something amiss in the operation, he vigorously questioned his partners, often in a confrontational way. "I was the angry dad," he says.
Bromwell is out $62,000 on loans he made to the organization that were never repaid. He was going to accept the loss, he says, until a February story in Gazette said that last year's PrideFest lost more than $75,000, "over half of which is still on Bentz's credit cards."
That was enough. Bromwell went public in March during a gay-themed radio call-in show, substantially stoking the controversy's fires. He has since alleged that Bentz may have skimmed money. "He's a liar, a schemer and a thief," Bromwell says of Bentz. "Did he set out to be those? I don't think so. But until he proves different, that's what he is to me."
Bentz, 39, is the toughest to get a bead on. Although appreciated by the gay community for his stewardship over PrideFest, he can be quite the artful dodger. The Pride president is given to disappearing acts. In the weeks leading up to last year's major events, he went incommunicado for days on end, his two partners say. I set up two meetings with him at his Tampa apartment. Both times he was a no-show. (He did finally turn up for an interview at the Planet offices.) Bromwell's first loan to Pride Inc. was for $3,000 so that Bentz could pay some bills and get his cell phone reactivated.
Unrealistic Fantasies
It didn't take long for the three-headed coalition to rupture. Bentz had organized a shoestring jaunt of nightclubs in New York, London and Paris called EuroTrash. The entourage last March included Bentz, Bromwell and Johnson, a handful of porn-star companions and exactly one paying customer. Bromwell says he was under the impression that EuroTrash was Bentz's venture, but soon after the trip, Bentz began to refer to the $30,000 he lost as Pride debt.
"Jim Johnson and I were shocked," Bromwell says. "It was Don's little fantasy." (Bentz says he later decided to eat the EuroTrash loss.)
A bigger blunder came soon after. The partners decided to move PrideFest from its most recent digs at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center to Raymond James Stadium, where a rally and the business expo would have plenty of room. Additionally, they booked a major concert act through a Chicago casting agency with close ties to Bentz. They coined it DivaFest.
Never mind that Pat Benatar, a hard-rock has-been from the '80s, had no cred as a gay diva; Tampa Bay Pride contracted her for $60,000. That did not include travel fees, staging, sound system, costs involved in using Ticketmaster for reserved seating and a raft of other expenses (including a $6,000 licensing fee to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for using the stadium). All told, the concert's budget pushed well into six figures.
Nowadays, there are conflicting stories about how Benatar was anointed diva. Bentz and Johnson say the board asked around and got a favorable response from the community. Bromwell says he was never in on the decision but would have opposed the choice.
One thing is certain: They paid too much. Rob Douglas, who has produced concerts at Jannus Landing and other Bay area venues for more than two decades, said a prudent payout for Benatar in this market would be around $15,000. Because she was not touring the region, he added, the price rose drastically; DivaFest would have been far better off booking an act that was already on tour.
The guys didn't know that. Bentz accepted the recommendation of the Chicago agency without seeking other alternatives. He admits now that the agency, Jumpstart Casting, has paid him to do other work — helping to run parties in Chicago and connecting the agency with Tampa Bay acts — but that conflict of interest was not widely known.
Johnson paid the $31,000 deposit to Benatar out of his own pocket. He figures he'll never get it back. The DivaFest ticket price was set at a reasonable $15 (parking included), but it was the first time the organization had charged for its flagship day. Gay grapevines were full of grumbling.
Bentz and company hoped to draw about 15,000, but sales sagged and coffers were thin. Benatar wouldn't even make the trip without another sizeable payment. That's when Bromwell bailed out DivaFest with a loan of $27,500, which he insisted be secured with a post-dated check. He recouped his money, but the event took a ruinous hit. Bentz estimates paid attendance at around 7,000. DivaFest lost nearly $100,000.
Ah, if the screw-ups had only ended there… .
The Purpose of Pride
Certainly, Tampa's PrideFest fell victim to inflated ambition and mismanagement. But perhaps it also suffered from an element of obsolescence. Pride festivals, which began as tributes to a 1969 gay uprising against police at the Stonewall Bar in New York, aren't what they used to be. They are a tougher sell to their community. Some gays and lesbians even wonder if they're still viable.
While gay life clearly has many hurdles remaining — from adoption issues to spousal rights to safety in schools — it does not suffer from the same sense of imminent threat that it did even a decade ago. Activists agree that the need to rally around merely being gay, to march in the street, is less urgent. As such, Pride gatherings have become less a matter of course for gay people who are not inclined toward activism. It used to be that gays wrestled with the notion of attending a Pride event for fear of being seen in public. For many of them now, it's more a matter of: Why bother?
"There was a time when the decision to attend a Pride event was a deep one," says Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida and one of Florida's leading gay activists. "You had to decide, 'Am I going to go and attend a public event, where media may be present, where people will be on parade, where people may see me?' Attending was a political act in and of itself. What we have now is a level of honesty and outness that's unprecedented, so even attending Pride takes on a different meaning."
Increasingly, it means having a good time. Bentz, Johnson and Bromwell, among others, maintain that the only apparent avenue to making Tampa's PrideFest an ongoing success was to accentuate entertainment. Sex, drugs and techno, if you will. That's what brought in the people. The Wet Party brought in the money.
There are those in the gay community, though, who think Bentz and company went too far when they tied in with gay porn stars to make appearances at PrideFest and Pillage & Plunder, a four-day cruise to Mexico that featured appearances by porn actors and a live sex show that was taped for video release. Johnson characterizes the cruise as a "four-day floating bathhouse."
Until last year, Pillage & Plunder was run through a Tampa travel agent and generated about $10,000 for Tampa Bay Pride. Figuring that Jim Garciga Travel was making too healthy a cut, the Pride trio decided to take over cruise operations themselves, which led to another round of woe.
Some gay people are ill at ease with the idea of running an event as risqué as Pillage & Plunder in the name of Pride. Bentz and his one-time cohorts counter that it was one of the few revenue-producing activities in the Pride pantheon.
Others in the community find it offensive that gay men should be held to a higher sexual standard. "A society that is tuning in in droves to watch Joe Millionaire and The Bachelorette and Victoria Secret commercials and the rest of the prurient horse shit can't even begin to place any kind of judgment on gay men getting together to party and be sexual," says gay activist Keith Roberts, who has long been involved with the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.
Still, there are community leaders who would like to see a local Pride get-together driven by more of a social conscience. It's tricky, though. "There's a constant tension between delivering socially relevant, consciousness-raising messages and creating a forum that draws the maximum number of people," Smith says. "Just like with any demographic, the entertainment is what draws people and you hope to give them nutrients with that. These tensions are absolutely everywhere. This is not new to Tampa [Pride]."
Regardless of what happens with Bentz et al., there will be a pride celebration in Tampa Bay this summer. Across the bay, a group called St. Pete Pride has scheduled a more modest event for the last weekend in June.
"We're going to be a little more grounded [than Tampa's]," says Brian Longstreth, a St. Petersburg realtor and the event's lead organizer. "Most people think of a Pride fest as walking down a public street, being visible, not being behind a huge venue. We're going to have a parade, a picnic in a public park. There'll be free events that are low-budget, humble and community oriented."
Chasing Their Tails
The seeds for further problems were sown even before the failed Benatar concert. In late spring and early summer, when ticket sales were lagging, the partners had to find some more money. Advance cabin sales for the November Pillage & Plunder cruise proved too tempting to leave alone, so Bentz and company began raiding its account to keep DivaFest afloat. Walen says Pillage was pillaged for about $35,000.
They figured it would be OK. The cruise had been a rousing success its first three years, and now that they had wrested full control from Jim Garciga Travel, the profits were bound to cover all shortfalls — and then some.
Yet another fiscal crisis reared up: A $60,000 installment was due to Regal Cruise Lines in July, and after the DivaFest disaster, the organization was broke. If Regal pulled the plug, how would cruisegoers get reimbursed? The guys were holding a lit firecracker — in their teeth. Bromwell stepped in and snuffed the fuse, mortgaging some real estate to make the payment.
The nature of Bromwell's second bailout has been the source of heated debate. He maintains that his $60,000 was purely and simply a loan — and has the contract, with its 7.75-percent annual interest, to back him up.
Others say that Bromwell knew the score and was motivated by Pillage & Plunder's profit potential. "He understood the risks when he put the money up; he invested in a business and the business lost money," says Walen, the former treasurer. "Now it's sour grapes. What happened to taking your lumps and moving on?"
But was the profit potential misrepresented? Bromwell contends that Bentz told him months before launch that the ship was already half full. It was actually more than half empty. Pillage & Plunder left port in November less than 50 percent booked. Result: another six figures in the debit column ($158,000 to Regal). And Bromwell was out his $60,000, with no post-dated check in his pocket. "As far as I'm concerned, Don Bentz defrauded me and my [life] partner out of that money," Bromwell states.
Why 2002 was the year Pillage & Plunder bombed is up to debate. Some people maintain that big gay-themed soirees have a fleeting shelf life. Others say the jaunt suffered without Garciga Travel's expertise and buying power. Bromwell and Johnson insist that at least some of the failure falls at the feet of Bentz, who lorded over the cruise bookings.
He pulled another vanishing act at crunch time. Bromwell says he took to checking voicemail messages from prospective Pillage customers. "People would call screaming, 'I've called 12 times,' and things like that," Bromwell recounts. "After awhile it became, 'Return my deposit!' I transcribed the messages and would get them to Don, but nothing happened."
"Don wouldn't answer the phone or return e-mail," Johnson says. "You might reach him at midnight, but you could never get him at 10 a.m. You cannot run an organization at midnight unless it's a bar."
There are murmurs in the gay community that Bentz had, and perhaps still has, a cocaine problem. Johnson chalks up Bentz's erratic work habits to drug abuse. "I did coke with Don," he says flatly. "Thing is, I didn't have a problem."
Bentz emphatically denies a drug dependency. While he admits to being hooked on crystal meth in the late '80s, he says, "I haven't done coke in quite some time. This has been one of the worst years of my life. I'm an emotional mess. With the stress, I can't sleep. People assumed I was up partying. I'd take a Xanax or Paxil to help me sleep and then crash, I was out."
Community Fallout
Bud Bromwell, while lacking proof that Bentz diverted funds to himself, has gone public with his suspicions. Most others don't buy it. "I'm comfortable with the fact that Don is not a thief," says Johnson. Walen adds: "Bud can scream and yell all he wants; there was no impropriety whatsoever. I saw every penny. There really wasn't money to embezzle."
Through pressure from talk radio and the gay community, Bentz says he has agreed to an independent audit of Greater Tampa Bay Pride's books. It's likely to hang over him, his new committee and PrideFest '03 for weeks to come.
Because of all the controversy, Bentz had considered canceling PrideFest this year. At a meeting last week, the new board decided to forge on — tentatively. Bentz said he would like to hold an expo and rally at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center or University of Tampa if he can bring in enough sponsors. He expects several parties to take place at different clubs, and looks to move PrideFest's premiere event, the Wet Party, to Adventure Island.
"We're going to do everything in our power to make sure Tampa has a Pride celebration," Bentz says, "but one that suits the financial reality of the community."
But the Wet Party itself is under a cloud. While the new group wants to continue it, Johnson and Bromwell, who each own a third of the trademark, vowed to sue if Bentz uses the name without properly compensating them. Bentz says he wants to cut his former partners in, but he's willing to change the name if the demands are too dear.
Meanwhile, Bromwell has some plans of his own. He has announced Gay Days Tampa Bay to be held in October at Busch Gardens. He's modeling the event after the hugely successful Gay Days at Disney World.
Although Bromwell is running the venture for profit, he says he doesn't stand to make, or lose, a lot of money. He'll take in $4 for each Busch Gardens ticket sold, while still offering them at a cut rate. If enough interest develops, he'll make a percentage from the host hotel, the Holiday Inn Busch Gardens.
Bromwell's biggest decision is whether to throw a major party and pay about $3,000 for a big-name DJ. He originally announced that such a bash would be called Better Than Wet, which sparked a strong backlash from some in the gay community. Bromwell has subsequently backed off: "[Better than Wet] was more of an 'I'll show you,' more of a joke."
Gay Days Tampa Bay has drawn further fire for overlapping with the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Bromwell says he was initially unaware, but ultimately saw an opportunity for some synergy. His detractors don't perceive it that way, though. "Now they're painting me as some ruthless mogul," he says with a chuckle. "I never wanted to take away from the film festival. I thought we could help each other."
Film festival organizers have passed on his request to team up, citing a "direct conflict."
In the end, this controversy will likely be little more than a speed bump for the gay community. One can only hope some lessons were learned.
"We strayed, we'd gotten so far from our mission," says Walen. "We weren't serving the needs of the community. These humongous events — they work in Atlanta, Chicago or New York. They don't work here."
Senior Writer Eric Snider can be reached at eric.snider@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 114.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2003.