The Ease with which One Plans a Pride Festival

I was just going through old emails/files, and I came across the 2018 and 2019 Rainbow Over the Bridge Pride Festival folders, so I took a trip down Memory Lane. I was struck by the fact that the first Pride Festival in Vincennes only happened 3 years ago. It feels like forever. I was looking through all of the photographs, the moving capture of the little girl who was overcome with emotion and rushed the stage to hug one of the drag performers, the young man who had come out to his parents and been kicked out of his house that very morning who went to pieces in the event emcee's arms on stage and was proverbially wrapped in the arms of an entire event, a photo of my daughter's unadulterated joy in the whole experience.

I read through the emails about the Sieur de Vincennes statue fiasco, through countless emails from parents of LGBTQ+ teens, some struggling with their children coming out, some asking for recommendations on how to be more supportive, some reaching out to thank us planners for having the festival in the first place, emails from LGBTQ+ community members who were grateful for the chance to finally see support in the place many of them had called home for several decades, if not their whole lives, emails from community leaders who were initially skeptics of the event but wanted to congratulate our team on an excellent event, and on and on.

I read through the files of the "Why I Pride" series, in which people who had attended sent me their experiences and/or the reason they came to the event, stayed at the event, will come back again and again.

Then I came across a post I captured and saved, and I busted out laughing. One of the most annoying parts of planning the Rainbow Over the Bridge Pride Festival was always the clowns insisting that they wanted a "Straight Pride Festival" or claiming it was unfair that there was a "Gay Pride Festival," so they were going to host a "Straight Pride Festival." I told one of them that the Kia Summer Sales event and Old Navy's Independence Day sale both happen in July, which is kind of the same thing as a Straight Pride Festival.

Anyway, I'm sharing this again, mostly for my former Pride Committee members, because God knows how tired we used to be by the time July rolled around. Ha! Miss you guys!

Happy Independence Day--cheers to a country where you are free to throw a "Straight Pride Festival," if you so desire, even though that sounds like a pretty lame get together...

Originally posted in June 9th, 2019:

I love it in June when insufferable straight people complain about wanting a “straight pride festival.” Like--this is America. If you want one, have one. Trust me. It’s not that hard.

All you have to do is put together a committee of responsible, dependable, like-minded people to work with on it, start your planning about a year in advance, talk to a financial advisor about how to proceed with fundraising, sponsorship, donations in a transparent legal way, maybe found a not for profit that can umbrella the festival under its safety, gather several thousand dollars in sponsorships and donations, , take out an insurance policy, choose a location, appear before your local Board of Works to secure a location and a date, start searching for and booking cooperative entertainment, keep raising funds, solicit vendors to join your festival, find a graphic designer to handle all marketing and advertising, plan a public media campaign, keep raising funds, make sure responsible, trustworthy person who is great with numbers can handle all of the finances, consult with attorneys to make sure all proper channels are being followed, plan out a map of the festival space, make sure a responsible person who is good with words can manage all of the channels of communication among the vendors and entertainers, find someone to handle the lights and sound, raise funds, find a way to fit dozens of planning meetings into your already busy schedule, be prepared for people to back out or randomly quit showing up and have new people who can pick up those balls when they get dropped, make sure all food vendors are aware of how to comply with the local health inspectors, raise funds, consult with local law and safety enforcement offices to garner plans of action in case of any and all foreseeable emergencies, work with the committee to design decorating schemes, raise funds, order and purchase all decorations and double check all inventory, plan a timeline for the event itself, plan a new layout because the first one won’t work for one reason or another, then make a schedule of what times and how you can successfully manage more than fifty or so booth spaces into a public space with the least headache for all involved, raise funds, send out hundreds and hundreds of emails and text messages making sure to keep all Festival anyone’s on the same page, put out fires that arise daily, ignore all of the horribly mean and hateful things that get said to you, about you, near you, during every step of the process, raise funds, recruit volunteers, then recruit twice that number of initial volunteers because at least half of them will find one reason or another they can’t participate in the eleventh hour, start blasting advertising for the sponsors, make sure you are still all working to push the marketing campaign, get signs made and put up all over the area, place yard signs around town, pass out fliers anywhere you can, be prepared for people to be rude to you, raise funds, get approached by lots of people with suggestions of how your committee could do a better job but who decline your offers to join and help on said committee, set deadlines for vendors, entertainers, sponsors to commit, decide who will or will not be let on board after that deadline and if any circumstances warrant this, raise funds, make sure you have a way to provide seating, tables, shade, water to visitors to the event, try to guess off the top of your head how many visitors that will be, raise funds, start meeting at least twice a week, sometimes for two hours at a time, for planning purposes, be prepared to lose a lot of sleep in the last few weeks leading up to the festival, go back through and do confirmations with every vendor, entertainer, speaker, volunteer, police officer, EMS worker, and participating businesses leading up to the event, get keys for any locked areas of public spaces, make sure restrooms are available for the correct number of attendees, which also requires hand washing stations, make sure your event is handicap accessible, plan to meet and help place the portalets and hand washing stations in correct locations, determine ways to keep these facilities safe, plan for deliveries of any chairs, tables, sound equipment, lighting equipment, tents, acquire a dumpster for trash removal, arrange for the proper number of onsite trash receptacles and recycling receptacles, raise funds, get volunteers to agree to be in charge of the unglamorous job of emptying them throughout the event, keep communication ongoing with all event everyone’s, push advertising and marketing everywhere, drink dangerous amounts of coffee because no one involved is sleeping anymore, and try to let go of all of the things that didn’t get done at the last minute because it’s event day.

Get up at the crack of dawn, arrive at the event location, make sure everyone brings what they were supposed to bring, designate errand runners for all of the stuff that might not have gotten brought, start decorating, mark off and label vendor spaces, receive all deliveries for the next several hours, usher in sixty booths worth of vendors and their supplies as seamlessly as possible, put out fires when vendors set up in the wrong space or try to rearrange booth space assignments, arrange for electrical checks and sound checks and light checks and communication checks, arrange for payment of all people who need to get paid, have a plan in place to collect funds from people who still owe the festival money, make sure all supplies have been bought and made their way on site, provide water for the workers, find people to make a food run, forget where you put your food and go hungry for most of the day, politely dodge wandering citizens who show up wanting to ask questions about what you are doing and why, politely dodge unsolicited opinions and suggestions from passers-by, make sure everyone who is supposed to show up does, in fact, show up, arrange for all monies to be kept safe in a hidden location until time of payment, make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible for the next five, six, seven hours, be ready to change plans, change directions, change times, change locations, change anything, change everything, or try to keep things from changing, soothe other people’s nerves and anxieties, be available for interviews with the media, pose for pictures like you’re not about to fly into a million pieces, check out and personally thank all sixty+ vendors by the end of the night, pay all people who need paid, try to recruit more volunteers to stay and help for clean-up, remain at the festival site location another two to three hours after the event ends making sure to leave the place cleaner than you found it, haul off all trash and recycling in the middle of the night, try to go home and sleep, get up the next day to return and double check the festival site, do more cleaning as necessary, reach out to all of those involved to give a verbal thank you, meet with the committee the next day to arrange to return keys, chairs, tables, supplies, portalets, handwashing stations, trash receptacles, dumpsters, supplies, tents, decorations, and any odd items left behind at the festival, figure out where to store everything you need to keep for the next festival, figure out a way to keep track of that inventory, have that graphic designer draw up thank you cards, work to come up with a list of all people who need thanked, ignore all of the hateful and mean things being posted about you, your friends, your family, your committee, your event all over the internet, mostly by people who didn’t come to the event, get thank you’s printed, double check to make sure everyone who needed paid got paid, everyone who owes you money has paid your money, all supplies have been returned to their rightful owners, then go ahead and check again, sit down and spend a few hours balancing all budgeting and writing up a financial report of the festival, make sure every single penny is accounted for, address, stamp, and mail all thank you’s, then then do it again for the ones that get returned or lost, keep ignoring mean things on the internet, don’t engage with mean people, do engage with kind people and supportive or curious media even though you are exhausted and need about a two week vacation in solitude on a remote island, then meet again that following week, and start the whole process over again, with all of the new suggestions you’ve been given and the new lessons you’ve learned.

Also, pro-tip--make sure no one touches any statues.

Do all of this while still raising a family and working a full-time job.

Trust me. It’s a piece of cake. Have your festival. What are you waiting for?