Cincinnati PRIDE festival

For all youse Cincinnatites, the GLBT PRIDE festival starts this evening at 4PM! Everyone’s welcome to attend no matter your orientation, and it promises to be a fun affair :slight_smile: Plus you might run into moi, which should be incentive enough for anyone to attend.

The location of the event is Hoffner Park! http://www.prideisalive.com/ for directions and more information.

Do you think “he who shall not be named, from Kansas” will liven up the festivities?

You know your event has “arrived” when the WBC comes to town! :stuck_out_tongue:

…or Immigration doesn’t let them into your country to protest…

We’dve just tried to sell him a rainbow feather boa :slight_smile: I swear to God there were people floating around who looked more like drug dealers pushing their rainbow-colored crack than legitimate vendors.

Anyway! Tommorow is the parade itself and I’ll be Schoolhouse Rockin’ with GLSEN Cincinnati. If it doesn’t rain, we’ll be walking with our big yellow bus made from foamcore looking absolutely fabulous.

Happy Pride Weekend!
Las Vegas always has theirs early (May) so people don’t die of the heat in June.

I just saw that in West Hollywood/LA Pride parade on Sunday, Grand Marshalls are Paris Hilton and her mother…uh, OK…whatever.

Glad to hear Canada got sensible! :smiley: They still keep the maple leaf flag upside down on a flagpole, outside their “church”. Right about the upside down American flag. They substituted the Swedish flag for the Canadian for a while, but now it’s back they way it was before.

It’s been raining cats and dogs here in Kansas, I hope your parade is sunny and happy! I’d love to see a rainbow feather boa.

That should have read “right above the upside down American flag”

OK so a brief update! First, I am burned to a CRISP. It was raining earlier in the morning and still on and off as we gathered together at the start point, but then the clouds parted and the humidity kicked up. I, being not as intelligent as I might seem, hadn’t bothered to put on sunscreen when I thought it would end up raining.

Second, we ROCKED! Eleven people marched with GLSEN itself and another five marched on behalf of their Gay/Straight Alliance right behind us. In order to understand the following part, I need to explain that GLSEN stands for the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. This year we unveiled our own Big Yellow Schoolbus to a resounding success. The two sides and the front were made out of gold foamcore board and each marcher walked with a piece on their side. Dan and I, the two co-chairs, held the two sections making up the front of the bus around our necks and waists by rope. Another volunteer brought in a boombox and a CD. Guess which one?

Schoolhouse Rock, BABY! Woohoo! Everyone lining the parade route saw our fabulous gold bus with GLSEN Safe Schools For All emblazoned on the side in paint and glitter dancing around to Conjunction Junction shouting “2,4,6,8 Gay and Straight: we educate” and “What do we want? Safe Schools! When do we want 'em? Right now!”. We got cheers every time. We also won the award for Most Creative Float, so obviously the judges liked it too.

Next year we’re gonna make a little stop sign on a stick to shove out one of the windows when the parade stalls. I’ll see if I can’t link some pictures in the coming days of it. Regardless of the fact that I am now a boiled lobster, I loved the parade and festival. I see pictures of so many other cities’ PRIDE parades and they seem so artificial with slick floats and entertainment, but ours was grassroots and very real! Wonderful to see the community put so much tangible effort into making it happen.

Just… wow!